Tim Parks - An Italian Education

And kiss and kiss the little bouquet

You sent me as a present yesterday.

Somewhat less eloquently, after a family argument which has to do with Rita and her brothers having forgotten to give Nonna a present on Mother’s Day, Rita’s father sends one of his circular letters to all his children, beginning with the all too stock expression: ‘Children, one only has one mother in this world, so I don’t see why you can’t…’

You never hear what would seem to be the obvious correlative: ‘One only has one father in this world,’ perhaps because, as for the baby in his shrines by the roadside, this isn’t quite true. You don’t have a father at all. Joseph is merely a stand-in. God is the father, and that fellow’s most distinguishing trait has always been his absence.

On Sunday Silvio rises at four o’clock in the morning to set off fishing. He likes to drive with friends twenty or thirty miles away and fish in remote streams. At six years old, his little Giovanni is clamouring to go with him but isn’t allowed. Or invited.

My friend Stefano also loves fishing, though he spends most of his Sundays cycling. He and his brother put the bikes on the car, drive as far as Boscochiesanuova, then set off on gruelling rides in the mountains panting right up to fifteen hundred metres in their fluorescent cycling strips. So Stefano claims. Marta, keeping Beppino from putting his fingerprints on the wall or his snots on the new crystal tabletop, remarks that it doesn’t seem to be doing much for Stefano’s paunch.

Now that his second child is getting old enough to cause trouble, Giorgio, my immediate neighbour, tells me he has been dreaming of leaving his safe job at the railways to collect and sell the rare fossils and minerals you can find in the mountains here. He would hunt for this or that crystal in the old quarries of Lessinia, for silver in the Carso… There is even a little gold, he tells me, above Turin. One would have to be away for days at a time, he explains, with a tent and a stove, and when you weren’t discovering minerals, there would be mushrooms to pick, truffles to unearth, and chestnuts in November and December. All far, far from home. Giorgio’s eyes are wistful. He knows he will never really leave his safe job with all its benefits, though he would probably love to be fired. For the moment he escapes from his children through intensive gardening. More exotic trees have been bought to replace those that died in last year’s frost. An elaborate plan has been hatched to pass the sprinkler system under the main driveway so as to take in the tiny strip of grass beyond the garages.

Mario also gardens: not the main condominium garden, like Giorgio, but his own patch at the back, which he has turned into an impressive display of shrubs, flowerbeds and lawn complete with pergola and barbecue and an electric socket for the TV on warm summer nights. But his apartment is round the front of the condominium, while his private patch of lawn is the furthest away of all at the back. When he goes out to do some gardening he is entirely out of sight and earshot of wife and child. He might just as well be off fishing in the watery Bassa or cycling in the rugged mountains, or prospecting in Piedmonte. I have never heard him complain about this arrangement.

Of course, in England the women often do the gardening. But not here. Here it’s the man’s escape. Monks are famous for their gardening. On Sunday afternoon the gardens of Via delle Primule are a-buzz with radios commentating the football match; likewise the strips of grit for playing bowls at Centro Primo Maggio, where Zia Natalina’s husband spends his free hours. It’s hard to spot a man with his child…

In the early and even late evening, when he might be at home with his wife and daughters (for the second baby was a bella bambina , too, and now a third is on the way), Righetti can be seen roaming round the various estates he’s built, showing flats to eager young couples or collecting rents, for garages, taverne , cellars. But since the whole business about Hristo began, he hasn’t bothered us. Hristo, it turns out, has left a wife and two children in Bosnia, the better to be able to provide for them. Everybody is very understanding about that. In reply to our threat of legal action, we have been told that if we insist, this will mean chucking the poor man out on the street, which is hardly Christian of us with him having all those mouths to feed.

In the pasticceria I commiserate with Iacopo on the mess his private life has become. He now rides a very big motorbike and is seriously into leather. He seems infinitely depressed. But no, he admits, no, there is no problem over access to his little boy. He taps his Raybans on the tablecloth, indicating that his time with young Sandro is no consolation. La visione del bambino is not his obsession. This is not America, and Iacopo is no Mrs Doubtfire. No, the problem is that there is alimony to pay. Unable to make ends meet with his creative paintings, he has started doing some things to order, which he despises. Portraits mainly, of wedding couples, of mother and baby… His new girlfriend, frighteningly slim and haggard and likewise into leather, looks old enough to be his…

‘Mamma!’ comes a shout from the apartment below us. Voices are raised. It’s nearly midnight of a hot night in July. Time for Francesco to capitulate and surrender the double bed to young Gigi…

I take the children to see Robin Williams’ Hook in a cinema parrocchiale in Borgo Venezia. It’s fascinating to observe how the story takes its spring from a father’s guilt at not having spent enough time with his children. This is mildly ludicrous, you can’t help feeling, in Italy, where there’s simply no need to feel guilty about such things. Your children always have their…

‘Mamma!’ Stefi calls in the night. ‘Mamma!’ As I’m awake, I get up myself and walk across the passage to see what the matter is. The little girl is on the lower of two bunk beds. ‘ Cara ,’ I begin. ‘Mamma!’ she screams. ‘I said I wanted Mamma.’ The situation is almost symmetrical to the time Rita called out ‘ Amore ’ from the kitchen and I was a fool to reply ‘ Sì ,’ since it’s obvious that when a mother calls out Amore without further specification, she is calling for her son. On this particular night it turns out that Stefi’s merely afraid because there’s a moth in the room. When Rita has finally woken up and got this information out of her, Papà has to go and kill the thing. Mamma refuses to do that.

‘ Chi chiama mamma ,’ announces the sibylline Frate Indovino, ‘non s’inganna.’ In rough translation this might read: You can never go wrong when you call for Mamma.

Michele takes this proverb very literally. Doing his homework, he shouts from his room: ‘Mamma, what’s three times seven?’ If I happen to be in the vicinity, I reply: ‘Twenty-one.’ ‘No, I want Mamma to tell me,’ he insists. ‘But I can do sums just as well as your mother!’ ‘I want Mamma to tell me. MAMMA! What’s three times seven?’ From some distant balcony Rita calls, ‘Twenty-one!’ And he is satisfied.

But what is it exactly that the Italian mother does to generate this extraordinary bond, this wonderful and wonderfully sick phenomenon that the Italians call mammismo? And when they talk about it they’re at once complacent and concerned, as when they talk about the public debt, or about rampant corruption. It’s one of those staples of Italian life you have to get used to. There’s hardly much point in asking whether it’s good or bad. In this sense it has the same status as British weather, or cooking…

Well, I suppose most of all what Mamma does is be there. Sabrina is there when Silvio is fishing, Marta is there when Stefano is cycling, Donatella is there when Giorgio is gardening. Mothers may be away at work during the week, but they are there during the weekends when Daddy isn’t. Of course, you think, why don’t these women get furious with their husbands for not taking the children with them? The answer to that is that they don’t want them to. They don’t want the children to be out in the hot sun, in the cold air, they don’t want the children to be over-tired, to fall off a mountain, fall in the river, or, even worse, miss a proper meal. When a father does take the children out, on his return he will have to hear: ‘Oh, but he’s exhausted, he’ll be ill; oh, but look at the scratch on his elbow; oh, but look at the bruise on his knee; oh, but he hasn’t eaten any fruit. Did he take a bidet when he…?’ A father taking his child out on a walk, on a trip, is a man on probation. His wife’s thoughts stalk him everywhere.