Tim Parks - An Italian Education

For a mother isn’t just always there, but always protecting. The roadside images show the woman with tiny child or dying man. In both cases her gesture is the same: the encircling arms.

‘Don’t run!’ screams Francesca as Gigi dashes out of the house. ‘You can’t run in this heat. You’ll sweat!’ Everybody knows that sweating is dangerous. Especially if there are draughts about. In blistering July anxious mothers close the last crack of the train compartment window to prevent their child getting a colpo d’aria , a draught. Everybody else understands and sits there patiently, near dying of asphyxiation as the sun beats on the pane. Or in winter mothers lean out of windows waving woollen sweaters or scarves and hats. ‘You’ll get cold, you’ll catch your death…’ In a country where the wind-chill factor is unheard of, big boys set off in fur, mittens and muffs, to walk the twenty yards round the back of the condominium to Papà’s car, for the four-hundred-yard trip to school. Not surprisingly, hypochondria is rife. When Gigi doesn’t want to go somewhere, he likes to complain of a pain in his knee. His parents rush him to hospital for tests…

Can hypochondria be extended to cover the morbid anxiety that one is in need, not only of medical attention, but also of cash? Believing one is ill and believing one is indigent are akin somehow, and both closely related to one’s relationship with…

‘Mamma!’ Zio Berto cries, embracing Nonna on one of those family reunions. They hug. Then she steps back. ‘Oh, but you’ve lost weight,’ she protests. ‘Oh, but you’re not eating well.’ Her boy is thirty-four years old now and has his wife beside him. As he is leaving after dinner she slips an envelope in his pocket with a million lire in it, though Nonno has sworn blind he will not give the children any more money. Why does the boy still need money when he’s a doctor? But the old woman explains indulgently: ‘As my grandmother always used to say, “ All’amore dei figli, non c’è amore che somigli .”’ To the love of children, no other love can compare.

Certainly not the love between husband and wife. In the Anglo-Saxon world, you might say, complicity traditionally, or at least ideally, resides in the relationship between the parents. In Italy it is crucially shifted towards the relationship between mother and child. ‘Don’t tell your father I did your homework for you,’ Marta tells Beppino, pulling his little ponytail. ‘He’d be angry with me…’

But beyond diet and swaddling and coddling and funding, Mamma has something else to offer: a suffused eroticism. All those beautiful Madonnas, all the embracing, all the games near naked in the summer heat, the family siestas on the big bed with the shutters closed against a scorching sun, the nights together with Papà relegated to the kid’s room. When Nonna hugs Zio Berto, she squeezes hard and perhaps tickles him. There are no evasive euphemisms here for those dangerous parts of the body one always suspected as an English child could never really be mentioned to one’s parents, since one’s parents never spoke openly of them to you. Here everything is properly caressed, properly talked about, thoroughly tickled. ‘My soul full of desire for love,’ writes D’Annunzio, ‘I think of your kiss, your trembling sighs, your gaze, your quiet laugh.’ One can’t imagine even the most sentimental Englishman writing such lines to his mother. On the other hand, it’s not for nothing that Italy has some of the leading theorists in group psychotherapy for families, not surprising that some young men have an extraordinarily inflated, mother-fed opinion of themselves and what is owed to them. It can be tough on Papà. On the day I write this, the radio has reported the case of a boy who, when his father refused him the keys to the faster of the two family cars, hit the man repeatedly over the head with a hammer. Mother tended to give him what he wanted…

Yet in the normal way of things, all goes smoothly enough, despite some extraordinary situations. I first met Stefano and Marta before they were married, when I gave them English lessons as a couple. They both felt they needed it for work, he to read The Economist , she to deal with foreign customers in her shop. One day I was going through the routine household objects. What do you have in your bedroom, Stefano? Desk, chair, bedside table… What do you have on the bedside table? Hesitation. Alarm clock. Ah, so, you use that for waking up? Pause. A little confusion. Stefano was already in his early thirties at the time. He already had his own business. Marriage to the girl he had known for fifteen years was just a question of when. ‘To wake up? No,’ he smiled. ‘No, you see, I don’t actually sleep in my bedroom. I sleep with my mother.’ Not apologising, but explaining, he added: ‘Always. Ever since I was a little boy, when Father died.’ Marta did not seem at all embarrassed that this had come out. When, eight and more years on, we go over to visit them one Sunday afternoon and he’s not there, I ask: ‘Cycling over the Alpine passes?’ and she says, ‘No, he’s gone to visit his mamma.’

‘Oh, is she ill?’ I couldn’t understand why he’d gone without the family, or not invited his mother over to their place.

‘No, he just wanted to spend the afternoon with his…’

‘Mamma,’ Stefi shouts. ‘Yes?’ I go through into the bathroom. ‘No, Dado’ — my daughter calls me Dado — ‘I only want Mamma to clean me.’

There are some advantages.

Can a child or person really have two nationalities, express the traits, that is, of two national characters? Or doesn’t one inevitably exclude the other? Or worse still, they simply destroy each other, so that rather than being English and Italian, my children with their mix of languages and habits, are neither one nor the other. These are imponderables. But there are moments when even imponderables are wonderfully incarnated. This tiny chapter remembers two of them…

It’s eight in the evening. I’ve just come into the room to send the kids to bed. Stefi is sitting on the floor playing with her dolls and singing a song: ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. She sings it in the well-to-do, upper-middle-class accent of the little children who made the English tape she has. Instead of her normal raucous tones, her voice is wavering and twee, as befits songs about little girls and their woolly little animal friends. Stefi loves to sing as she plays:

She took the lamb to school one day,

School one day, school one day.

She took the lamb to school one day.

It was against the rules!

But when Stefi gets to this line — ‘It was against the rules’ — she suddenly makes a violent gesture. Her chubby right hand becomes a fist that shoots up from the elbow as the left hand slaps down on the right forearm to stop it and give the gesture its fierce tension. Like the sign of the cross, it’s another piece of behavioural bric-a-brac she’s perhaps learnt watching football on TV with Dad. If you don’t want to be so rude as to actually make that gesture, an Italian can say, ‘You know where my grandfather kept his umbrella, don’t you…’ (Those grandparents again!)

But the funny thing is how Stefi knows to make that rebellious, disrespectful gesture at just the point where dear little Mary breaks the rules and brings her lambkins to school come hell or high water. ‘There,’ her crooked elbow and clenched fist says, ‘see how much I care about your stupid rules.’ It’s not a sentiment I get from listening to the tape.

Then Michele comes in and says to me, in English, ‘Oh, don’t be so fiscal, Daddy. Don’t be so fiscal.’

He’s complaining about my sending them to bed on time, and what he means is fiscale. Non essere fiscale, Papà . Look at a dictionary and it will tell you that the word derives from the Latin fiscus , a basket, then came in Italian to be fisco , the coffers of the state, and then, by unpleasant association, the people responsible for filling those coffers. In short, the tax collectors. So that fiscale means, as fiscal does in English: having to do with taxes. But given Italian feeling about rules in general and taxes most particularly, the etymology could hardly stop there. So what was originally a basket in the days of Caesar’s empire had come to mean, by the days of Benito’s, ‘severe’, ‘exacting’, and then, by inevitable slippage, ‘too severe’, and even ‘perversely exacting’.