Tim Parks: An Italian Education

When I arrived in Italy in 1981, more eager to escape friends and family and underachieve in peace than to go anywhere in particular, I swore I would never write about the place. There are so many books about Italy. Unpublished then, my only plan was to write one more novel before giving up and finding something sensible to do. I wasn’t ‘collecting material’.

And yet… places are different. Splendidly so. Perhaps that was something I hadn’t fully appreciated then. And once one has discounted individual traits, class attitudes, generation gaps and, of course, the myriad manifestations of different personalities, still a substrate of national character does exist. The French are French somehow, the Germans are predictably German, the Italians, as I was slowly discovering, indisputably Italian. So that after I had been in this country — what, five years, six, seven? — rarely moving from the village where I lived, the small town of Verona where I worked, I gradually became aware of having all kinds of things to say and to tell that I couldn’t put in any novel, or not the kind that I like to write. At that point, I only needed a publisher to come along and twist my arm, and there I was doing what I’d always said I wouldn’t.

Still the question remained, how to get at this business of Italianness without falling into cliché, without merely appealing to what people already know? Perhaps this is not the kind of problem you can ever really put behind you, but the solution, so far as there was one, seemed to be to write only about those people and places I knew intimately, my neighbours, my street, my village, never to stray into the territory of the journalist, never to assume the eye of the traveller passing through. Which meant just the one travel book and then no more, I told myself as a sop to consistency, writing the last paragraphs of Italian Neighbours . After all, this was the only world I knew about in Italy. My condominium, my street. The only place I felt was really mine. What else would I ever write about here?

And then the following summer, floating in the Adriatic that morning with the way the southern sun heats up your brains even in deliciously cool water, it occurred to me that there was another world I knew here, or was getting to know: the world of children, my own boy, my neighbours’ children, and, why not, the older children I have taught for years at the university. So one could write a book about that world and about everything peripheral to it: how it began, what it entails, where at some point it must end. And perhaps — the idea began to take on the urgency of a swift current tugging in the water, the obviousness of the sun’s bright pressure on my closed eyes — yes, perhaps by the time we got to the last page of such a book, both the reader and, far more importantly myself, would have begun to understand how it happens that an Italian becomes Italian, how it turns out (as years later now it has turned out) that my own children are foreigners.

I swam back. The boy on the rocks had got his girlfriend to take her bra off, not imagining that anybody ever ventured beyond the breakwaters. Or perhaps not caring. In any event, I kept my head down, then had to look up again to avoid the gathering pedal-boats nearer the shore. I waded through the children from the colonia , bored with being in the water now but apparently not allowed to get out yet. They must spend a certain time in the water every day to get their iodine. Their mothers counted on it when they sent them there. As they likewise counted on the fact that they wouldn’t drown. The attractive teacher was working hard inventing games that the children didn’t want to play.

I hurried back to the sunshade, towelled down, returned all the beach clothes and toys and lotions and magazines to the bathing cabin, then joined my father-in-law for our aperitivo .

This is Mediterranean ritual at its lived and loved best. These are the times when I feel glad I came here. There is a big paved terrace shaded by a trellis of vines, a few video games mobbed by ten-year-olds, the majority straining to see over the shoulders of the few who have grabbed the action. There is a jukebox fed by a couple of adolescent girls in delightfully skimpy costumes and grinding out the inevitable summer songs: hoarse and husky voices in banally rhyming love. And there is lots of junk food to eat. Everybody has a pizzetta in their hands, a small round doughy pizza held in a couple of greasy napkins. My fat father-in-law, white sunhat tipped back on freckled baldness, puts one in Michele’s eager hands, then sits back to enjoy his wine, his sausage meat stuffed with olives, and the spectacle of beautiful young people strutting and swaying back and forth from road to beach with next to no clothes on. Ah. These are our best moments together. We understand each other perfectly. The wine, then a cigarette perhaps. An extraordinary sense of well-being, the little boy relatively quiet for a change with his face full of pizza.

I tell my father-in-law about the book I plan to write. He’s enthusiastic, says I should put in some stuff about how different childhood was in his time. When his father went to bed he used to put a pencil mark on the salami to show where it had been eaten up to, so that none of the ten children could chew on it during the night. Nobody had been feeding him pizzas at one and a half!

Like many Italians, my father-in-law has a genius for appearing hard-done-by. I point out to him that he has more than made up for this deprivation since. He laughs. The man is never in a better humour than when eating and drinking away from his womenfolk. He calls over a waitress, who, of course, knows him and all his likes and dislikes, and another plate of munchies is ordered, another couple of glasses of wine. Why not? When Michele finishes his pizzetta and begins to nag, Grandfather sticks a couple of tokens in his hand and tells him to go over to the motorised rocking horse. That nice girl there will put the money in for him. This gives the old man a chance to tip his hat at a tubby twelve-year-old and make all sorts of signs and gestures to get her to play babysitter. Michele toddles confidently away.

We are just settling into this summer bliss when my wife arrives. This, I must say, is most unusual. Aperitivo time in Pescara is supposed to be her break, when the men ‘look after the child’, buying, as Michele was quick to discover, his cooperation in every possible way. Perhaps she has come because today is the last day; tomorrow morning we will be driving back north to the oppressive heat of a Veronese summer.

Rita sits down smiling and, amazingly, does not scold us for having farmed the kid off to a little girl. I had been expecting the worst. Nor for smoking in his presence. Amazingly again, she orders not a glass of wine, but a gingerino : bittersweet, red, treacly, over-priced. She shouldn’t drink alcohol, she says.

This is not like her. Generously, I ask if the shops were crowded.

She didn’t go shopping, she said. Mamma, hers, is preparing pasta e fagioli for lunch. Pasta and beans. Not my favourite. And now she bursts out laughing. She left the beach to check her predictor , she says. And it was positive.

Her what? I haven’t understood because she’s pronounced the word Italian fashion — preydeektorr — as she must when speaking Italian to her father.

Her predictor . She switches accent. And slowly it dawns. My father-in-law, when he understands, is aghast. This is a big mistake. What about Rita’s career? Big families are decidedly a thing of the past. Nobody can afford more than one child now. Do we want to be putting marks on the salami again, the wine bottles? Etc., etc. My book is set back six years or so…