Tim Parks - An Italian Education

I stood up and at once a car drew up beside me, blocking the road. The priest wound down his window. He has a small round flabby face with rimless glasses. Although we had never spoken to each other before, he announced very abruptly: ‘Isn’t it about time your son took his first communion?’ I think he knew Michele from when Zia took him to all her funerals. Certainly Michele knew him because Don Guido sometimes comes to talk to their class.

‘Communion?’ I was taken aback. ‘My son isn’t even baptised.’

Rather than being shocked the priest said very practically: ‘Well, we can baptise him then.’ The drowned car forgotten, the children were all ears now. They are perfectly aware that something is up as far as their parents and religion is concerned, something that separates them from the other children. For myself, I was annoyed at the man’s presumption. I said, ‘As I recall, if my son is baptised before he comes of age, I have to make promises about bringing him up in a Christian fashion, promises I can’t possibly keep and don’t mean to.’

This time the priest did seem surprised. Indeed, so much so that after staring at me half a moment in almost wonder, he wound up his window and was gone without so much as a buona sera . Didn’t I understand, he must have been asking himself, that it was the form that mattered, rather than the content? That it is the image of Sant’Eurosia and our devotion to her that are important, not whatever it was she did. The emotion attaches itself to the form, the gesture, as when my in-laws embrace everybody so warmly before disappearing into months of silence and broken promises. It was frankly churlish of me to start talking in this dogmatic fashion about the details of the baptism service, thus excluding my children from the community merely for the sake of some ridiculous pride that attached itself to dubious notions of sincerity and coherence. But it would take me another while yet in Italy to appreciate that. Or perhaps it’s writing about it that gets you there. As a rule of thumb, the more you write, the less sure you feel about your point of view. One hopes that’s as it should be.

But not to digress too much, let’s finish with a walk that takes you high up into the hills above Novaglie. Here, on a blistering day in August we found a place where the jet from a farmer’s huge water cannon strays out onto the road. You can stand there by the fence and at intervals of two to three minutes you get the gentlest of gentle showers. We stood there laughing. In low sunshine the pumping water was white and very bright against the dusty blue grass and scrub of the hillside beyond. Until, in between sprays, there came a whistle, sudden and very sharp. I whistled back. The whistle came again with a slightly different modulation. On the other side of the road, just visible through a chink in a cypress hedge, the children found a mynah bird in a cage the size of Sant’Eurosia’s shrine.

‘Like Checca!’ Stefi cried. But this bird was far more skilled.

‘Try some words on it,’ I said.

‘ Ciao! ’ the children shouted.

The mynah bird said ‘ Ciao .’ It didn’t seem very interested and launched into a most complicated whistle.

‘ Pronto ,’ Michele said.

‘ Pronto ciao ,’ the bird said. ‘ Pronto ciao .’ As some will say when they answer the phone.

‘Try some other words,’ I said. So they ran through the following:

Hello

–

no reply

Santa patata!

–

no reply

Buon giorno

–

‘

Buon giorno

,’ said the bird.

O la miseria!

–

no reply

Porca vacca!

–

no reply

Pizza

–

no reply

Merda

–

no reply

Clearly this is a conservative, sensibly fed, well-educated bird, I thought. Then in perfect imitation of Zia Natalina, Stefi sang out: ‘ O la Madonna! ’

‘ O la Madonna! ’ the bird came back. As if to say, ‘How long it took you!’

‘Have you ever thought that the first word Jesus, the Man-God ever pronounced was “Mamma”?’

One of the many publications the Frate Indovino tries to sell you through his calendar/almanac is Cara Mamma , ‘a marvellously illustrated volume that speaks to the heart about la mamma , that person whom the whole world esteems, whom children seek and love, the Bible celebrates, the saints venerate, churchmen honour, monks do not forget, nuns emulate, the suffering invoke, the poets sing of, writers exalt…’

What are all those images the children find along their walks if not a mother and her son, Hristo? And the first word, Cara Mamma tells us, the very first word that the one ever pronounced was the name of the other, Mamma!

In Italian, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Cara Mamma also tells us things like: ‘When God realised his task was great, he created la mamma …’ And again, Few children are worth what their mamma suffers for them.’ There are colour illustrations of yearning, generous faces — modern photographs or Renaissance Madonnas (often surprisingly similar) — and these are placed alongside embarrassing poems by the venerable likes of Pascoli, Ungaretti and D’Annunzio: ‘Cry no more,’ writes the latter. ‘Your favourite son is coming home…!’

It is one of the curiosities of Italy that even in the heyday of feminism, even in times when the only child is left with his grandparents while mother is off to work, the mamma mystique has lost none of its attraction and power.

At the scuola materna the children are always at work on what they call lavoretti , little practical projects, like making a basket of flowers with paste and paper, or a rag doll, or a pastry plaque in the shape of an angel with tinsel eyes. On Mother’s Day, May 12th in Italy, Stefi’s lavoretto is a piece of paper with her handprints all over it in different coloured paints. But the paint is not so thick as to obscure the poem that the ever serious Irma has had computer printed on every child’s paper:

Cara Mamma ,

quante volte ti arrabbi

vedendo dappertutto

le impronte

delle mie manine !

Scusa ,

se anche oggi per la tua festa

te li regalo .

Conservale ,

e un giorno ben lontano ,

rivedendole ,

ti ricorderai

quanto erano piccole le mie manine

quando cercavano le tue .

Dear Mummy,

How often you get angry

seeing the prints of my little hands

everywhere.

Forgive me,

if I bring them to you

even today, Mother’s Day.

Keep them

and one day far in the future,

looking at them again,

you’ll remember

how very small my little hands were,

when they reached out for yours.

It is noticeable that, as with family greetings, when it comes to the subject of mamma , reticence is not at a premium. ‘Earned emotion’ is not an idea I have ever heard mentioned in Italy. Any extravagance of sentiment is legitimate. This seems to be as true of the great poets as of the minor. The following stanza of a poem by D’Annunzio is addressed to his mother, not to one of his many mistresses:

Ti scrivo qui, seduto al balconcino

della mia cameretta, in faccia al mare ,

e bacio ogni momento il mazzolino

che ieri mi mandsti a regalare .

I write to you from the balcony

Of my room, looking out to sea,