Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘Don’t be fiscal,’ Michele says, knowing I like him to speak English. ‘We’ll be good if you let us stay up.’ What he means is, these rules (which he doesn’t know are typically English) don’t need to be applied to the letter (a flexibility typically Italian). Then, still dealing in English institutions — this time the fact that I read to them most evenings before going to bed, something which, since they don’t actually send their children to bed but merely succumb to sleep along with them, Italian parents hardly have the opportunity to do — Michele throws in a juicy ricatto : ‘If you let us stay up another half an hour, we’ll go to bed without being read to.’ Finally, with an exact perception of my obsessive protestant work ethic, which he will never share, he adds, ‘That way you can translate a bit more…’ He has thus managed to arrive at a trade by which I actually get to work more by not sending them to bed…

Meanwhile, Stefi has reached the last verse. And beyond. She has modified the English nursery rhyme.

So Mary found another lamb,

‘Nother lamb, ‘nother lamb.

Mary found another lamb,

Better than the first.

She’s very proud of this addition. What a miserable sad ending the English version has. Hers is so much sunnier.

I let them stay up. The story of my fatherhood has been that of a long strategic retreat from the systems I hoped to impose. ( Tristram Shandy is another book that must remain largely incomprehensible to the Italian spirit.) But then neither have my attitudes to the fisco remained as solid as they were. If my children are inevitably acquiring an Italian education, they force me to acquire one, too. At least up to a point. And when I protest that there’s no point in having rules unless they’re enforced, inventing a bedtime without imposing it, Rita says complacently, ‘Why don’t we sit out on the balcony a bit and have a drink?’ So you sit there in the late twilight with a thin cloud cover veiling the moon, a light breeze stirring the cherry blossom and a swelling chorus of frogs croaking their way to the pools at the bottom of the valley. And your wife says: ‘Miserable weather, non è vero ?’

‘Then the headmistress will take one step back,’ Michele is eagerly explaining, ‘after which the president steps forward and takes the floor.’

‘Does what?’

‘Takes the floor.’

‘Starts speaking.’

‘Teacher said, takes the floor.’

But to me, ‘takes the floor’ sounds ridiculous in the mouth of an eight-year-old. ‘Starts speaking,’ I insist. ‘That’s what it means after all.’

Michele shakes his head. ‘You’re not Italian,’ he observes sadly.

We are in the courtyard behind his school where he is showing me a strip of fresh turf a couple of metres wide and thirty metres long, linking three small newly planted trees in a narrow carpet of pea green, surrounded on every side by swept concrete.

‘The grass was laid only yesterday,’ he tells me excitedly. Indeed, the gridwork of squares is all too obvious, the last-minute search for a cosmetic effect endearingly evident. For today is the hundredth anniversary of Montecchio’s elementary school. It’s eight-thirty in the morning, and we have just brought along a big carton full of sodas and munchies for the celebrations later in the day.

‘Anyway, then the president takes the floor and…’

‘Which president?’

Michele thinks. ‘The president of the republic.’

‘What?!’

‘The president of the republic.’

For a moment I almost believe him. In one of those hateful pre-election PR jobs where public figures like to be seen mucking in with the people and above all kissing little children: the president of the republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (newscasters must be under instructions never to spare us the Oscar Luigi) turns up in the small village of Montecchio with three thousand bodyguards and journalists to celebrate the centenario of the elementary school and shake everybody’s hand while pretending to be unaware of a battery of television cameras. Then the absurdity of it comes home to me.

‘No, Michele. If the president of the republic was coming, the place would have been under siege for weeks.’

‘Oh.’ He looks puzzled, probably doesn’t understand ‘under siege’. Then he remembers. ‘The president of the circoscrizione ,’ which is to say, of one of the eight local districts that form the municipal area of Verona. This seems more likely.

‘And Poggiolini,’ he adds thoughtfully.

‘Poggiolini?’

‘Yes, he is going to make a speech.’

But the only Poggiolini I know of is a prominent national figure recently arrested for his part in a complex scandal having to do with taking kickbacks for inserting second-rate pharmaceuticals on the list of those medicines that can be obtained by subsidised prescription. Presumably, Michele has been getting the news mixed up with whatever his teacher has been telling him.

We are back in the entrance of the building now, where my son is showing me the commemorative plaque to be unveiled in the presence of various notables.

But not Poggiolini. I explain that Poggiolini is in gaol.

‘But he is an important man.’ Michele is sure he was coming.

‘He’s in gaol. There are lots of important men in gaol.’

‘But why?’

‘For stealing.’

‘But why do they steal?’

‘Perhaps because they have so much opportunity.’

‘But why?’

‘Because important people have to spend all the money that people pay in taxes, and sometimes they spend it on themselves.’

This is a conversation we have had to go through any number of times since corruption scandals both local and national started filling up ninety percent of news programmes. It’s been going on for more than a year now and I am still not sure if Michele has grasped the mechanics of it. Nor I, perhaps. Nor the lawyers.

After a moment’s reflection, Michele assures me that when he becomes an important public figure he will not steal. I say, ‘ Benissimo .’

Maestra Elena arrives, dressed to the nines in dark blue tailleur and puffy flesh-coloured blouse, her hair freshly coiffeured, sprayed, fixed, helmety, the same sort of obvious obeisance to the big occasion as is suggested in the neat geometry of fresh turf. Parents, mainly mothers, are busily coming and going with contributions of wine, crisps and nuts, bowls for putting the food in. Nervously jolly, Elena thanks me for the box of edibles we have brought, but I can see a glint of concern in her eyes at my somewhat bleary, unshaven state and scruffy clothes. There’s a jittery, before-the-event mentality in the air, a mixture of elation and worry. Elena wants everything and everybody to be just so. I almost catch myself reassuring her that we still have an hour to get home and brush up before the solemnities begin.

In the event, when we arrive back at the school en famille and in somewhat better shape right at ten o’clock, only a few people have so far gathered outside the gate. We wait. The school is a solid two-storey building in fading fleshy yellow stucco with wearily noble surrounds to door and windows. When first built, it seems the central part of the construction was used as a town hall and only a few rooms in the wings were given over to lessons. Now, brushed-steel window fittings seem to leap out from the stone like bright metal in greying teeth. The shutters, which are always closed in the evening against possible vandals, are dark green.

Most parents arrive a respectful ten minutes late. But still the ceremony doesn’t begin. It turns out there are logistical problems as to where everybody is to stand. The school is set back from the road and sensibly protected by a low wall topped with tall green railings reinforced with ancient wire netting. Just inside the gate a double flight of stairs leads up, from right and left, to the main entrance where the still-veiled plaque is. Since there is precious little space between railings and school, people are warned that they will have to stay outside the gate for the first part of the ceremony. The children, meanwhile, those who are pupils at the school, have gone inside to put the last touches on the songs and poems they are to perform. A few well-chosen specimens, all girls, are leaning over the balcony above the porch whence the Italian tricolour will be raised at the appropriate moment. The parents mill below, as they do when they wait each evening for their kids to come out. I can see Francesco and Francesca, our downstairs neighbours, and Silvio and Sabrina. They tell me they have discovered that Hristo is using a Camping Gaz in the basement. What’s more, he’s now surrounded by drums of paint, since it seems the imbianchino didn’t have enough space for all his materials in his own garage. ‘Is the paint flammable?’ Francesco asks. Could the whole condominium explode when Hristo cooks his beans? Silvio makes the corna gesture, but his smile is grim. We will have to have another condominium meeting…