Tim Parks - An Italian Education

I must say I have always felt a certain admiration for those who introduce ‘if’ clauses into their dealings with the divine, as though bargaining from a position of strength. Little Beppe says: ‘But the names in the village square died. The ones on the monument.’ A rather attractive young mother explains patiently and sincerely that that was precisely because they weren’t here in Mizzole under the protection of Sant’Eurosia.

Where were they then?

In Russia, most probably. Unarmed, without winter clothes…

Still crowded in the chapel, Stefi says she’d like to light a candle. Actually, there are already two candles alight on the altar, but they’re of the big cylinder variety covered in red plastic so that the wax can’t escape and is guaranteed to burn for something like a hundred hours, come hell or high water. They’re designed for cemeteries, these monster candles. A label on the side of the plastic announces that the brand name is Santa Chiara — the religious goods trade is not without its wit. Whoever put the candles there didn’t trouble themselves to remove the supermarket bar code.

There are no candles for visitors to light, however. Nothing for Stefi, that is, who protests. D’Artagnan says, ‘Why don’t we blow these candles out, then light them again with Maestra Elena’s cigarette lighter?’ But here the parents object, and anyway All-three-musketeers tells his companion bluntly: ‘It’s no good you lighting a candle, because you’re going to hell anyway, because you don’t believe in God.’

Michele’s friends have been telling him he’ll go to hell ever since he became one of only two in his class to opt out of the ora di religione . ‘At least I don’t have to go to catechism,’ he replies staunchily. Obviously, he feels it’s a fair trade. None of the parents make any comment.

Then from Mizzole it’s all along the flood overflow ditch and the busy road back to Montecchio: nothing to look at and parents screaming at their kids to keep in single file away from the traffic. ‘What terrible weather,’ Marta says, ‘so sticky, so hot. Poor Beppe is sweating like a pig.’ Under his sweater and rainproof jacket…

Somebody who wasn’t sweating, however, as we were very soon to discover, was our new and, it has to be said, unwanted tenant at Via delle Primule, no. 6. On our return from the walk I sent Michele down to the cellar with his and my boots. Every apartment has a little cellar at semi-basement level where you can store such things as gardening tools, skis, bottling equipment, barbecue forks and the like. In just a moment the little boy came running back breathless to say there was a man down there in the cellars, a man he had never met before. Living down there, he said…

I hurried down myself. As well as six cellars for the six apartments, there were also the two small taverne , semi-basement rooms with chimney attachments for winter barbecue parties. Silvio had rented one of these for his weight-lifting machines, but the other, larger taverna was, as far as I knew, still free. Now, when I got down to the narrow corridor beneath the palazzina , it was to find the door to this taverna open and a young man inside. He had a camp bed on the floor, a sleeping bag and a battered suitcase, and he wore blue jeans and a tattered shirt. Silvio was already down there trying to talk to him. But the man spoke almost no Italian. ‘ Mio nome, Hristo ,’ he said. He smiled. Then he tried English: ‘Name. Hristo.’ His physiognomy shouted Slav. He seemed harmless, charming and totally indigent. Clearly, he was cold.

We phoned Righetti. Righetti claimed he knew nothing about Hristo. He had rented the taverna to a local imbianchino , a whitewasher, to store some of his stuff in. This was perfectly legitimate, he said. If none of us wanted to rent or buy the room, he could give it to whoever he liked. We phoned the whitewasher, who spoke in fierce dialect and said Hristo was working for him, and that this was a very temporary arrangement, until the boy found somewhere to live.

‘But where does he do his wee, Papa? Where does he poo?’ Michele asked. Indeed! The children were fascinated. The Yugoslavia they had vaguely seen on the TV had come to our basement; and as with the blacks who try to clean your windscreens for money at the crossroads, it was difficult to explain that your annoyance was directed not at them, who were legitimate objects of charity, but at the people who thrust them on your doorstep, indeed under your doorstep. At a condominium meeting we all agreed we must be charitable to Hristo, while declaring a full scale war of our own against Righetti and the imbianchino .

Walks. I’ve described just one, but since in the children’s minds, as in my own memories of childhood, all walks will probably muddle into the one long walk of growing up, perhaps now is the time to mention some others. Let’s start with the one we most commonly take, the path with the stream on one side and the irrigation ditch on the other that goes from Montecchio to the Ferrazze. It’s a walk of long wet grass full of croaking frogs, of sluices raised or lowered either side of you, of channels fanning out across the fields, and if you sit on one of the occasional cement slabs that bridge the irrigation ditch, you can dangle your feet just above the water and at evening time watch swallows dive into the line of the water and skim the lily leaves straight at you. Here they come, look, fast and low, flapping madly. Then at the last moment they sheer off above your heads. I think of The Dam Busters . Michele thinks of Star Wars . He makes the appropriate noises of lasering them down. Further on, attached to a branch with a piece of wire above an abandoned scooter, Stefi spies a small colour print of San Bernardino of Sienna. He is bending down to hold a lantern by a locked door. The children ask what the saint did, why is the picture hung on the tree. I don’t know, any more than I knew who Sant’Eurosia was. But I can explain the bunch of fresh flowers by the kerb where the path comes out onto the street again at the Ferrazze. That’s to mark where a young man died when he fell off his moped some years ago. Above the flowers in wobbly hand on fading board someone belatedly wrote the words, Maria proteggici! Mary, protect us!

Or there’s the silent walk striking up through a pathless wooded gulch above San Martino Buon Albergo. Here in winter it seems the frost never thaws, the deep undergrowth cracks beneath your feet, so that you stop and listen to the stillness, because this is trespassing. You tell the children not to breathe a word — they love that — ‘Move quietly, Stefi, piano! ’ — and at the top, in the high, old, dry stone wall that marks off a once aristocratic domain, hunters have set snares at regular intervals, fitting loops of wire round those holes that wooden scaffolding once went into. The wire is attached to a brick or heavy pipe which is then balanced on a piece of wood set between the stones. They’re hare traps. Inside the old stone wall is a nature reserve set up by the Glaxo drug company. Michele likes to dismantle all these traps, with a very severe look on his face, ripping out the wire, throwing the bricks into the wood, as if he were Christ turning over the tables in the temple, or some classical hero of the stories we’ve been reading, hacking at a monster’s scales.

‘How many hares do you think we have saved?’ he asks, breathlessly, already looking for the next. Like all little boys he is obsessed by measurements. How many kilometres have we walked? How far away is the sun? How many metres have we climbed? How much does the mountain weigh? How long have we been walking? How many vipere are there in a square kilometre? How many sandwiches have we brought? As if by answering these questions something might be explained.