Tim Parks - An Italian Education

In any event, there are no playing fields at the primary school, or the scuola media , the next one up, and there are no public spaces here where kids can just play. To play football on grass your kid has to enroll in A. C. Montecchio…

You take your boy along to the village’s only field, surrounded by a cypress hedge and tall fences and a gate to lock it up when it’s not being used officially. That’s an important concept. You pay up. Not much. Your son is given a kit bag in the team’s colour with the name of the team on the side, a team shirt and team shorts. A. C. Montecchio has a new coach this year, a man, incredibly, who used to play for the Hungarian national side, or so the big posters they’ve put out around the village claim. But this celebrity only teaches the older teams. Then his wisdom is passed down through team members to the infant groups. And what it mainly involves is drilling. Because it’s not worth starting to play football until you have done hours of drilling, hours upon hours, just as there’s no point in playing the piano until you’ve done all your scales, major and minor, backwards and forwards.

You go to pick the boy up at five-thirty perhaps on an October evening. It’s deep twilight, and they’re still running about touching their toes and jumping in the air, then practising penalties, then practising headers. At the end there’s only time for a ten-minute game, under the dim glare of one of four floodlights now. By December, whoever’s in goal freezes to death, though he does have the official team gloves. The trainer screams and shrieks for the kids to pass. ‘Pass, per l’amore di Dio! The way I told you in the drill!’ He blows his whistle a lot, though rarely for fouls. He sends one boy off for holding onto the ball too long. Then he sends another off for saying porca vacca! Good job it wasn’t Michele.

Training’s supposed to end at six, but drags on and on. They want us to know that they take it very, very seriously and are developing our children’s talents. These pieties are in the air, which otherwise is icy now. Frankly, I’m shivering. In fact, I’m savouring the word sacrifici , rolling it over and over on my tongue, while from the touchline other waiting parents are yelling complicated advice into the gloom. ‘ Devi gestire lo spazio in modo dinamico! ’ You have to have a dynamic sense of territorial control! Little Mirko doesn’t even look up, idling in an offside position. The parents wave their arms. Generally, both mothers and fathers are disappointed with their sons’ performances. They shout things even worse than porca vacca . Why can’t the kids do it like on TV? God knows they watch enough! Michele gets the ball full and hard in his face and keels over on the frosty grass.

The gate to the pitch is at the end of Zia Natalina’s street and going back we pick up Stefi, who is inside in the warm learning to cut pieces of folded paper so that they will come out as angels with joined hands. ‘ Santa patata , Michele,’ Zia says, ‘you look like the abominable snowman.’ Actually, his face is bright red. Very soon he will decide he doesn’t like football. He will tell me so over a restorative hot chocolate in the pasticceria . He doesn’t know why, but he just doesn’t like it. He shakes his head solemnly. Even if Gigi La Magna did once play with Roberto Baggio. ‘You do exactly as you please,’ I tell him generously, warming icy hands round my cup. ‘There’s no pressure on you at all.’ Open on another table the pink Gazzetta dello Sport has a huge headline to announce that someone has paid fifty billion lire for someone. But I feel I can let that pass.

My friend Iacopo is not so lucky. His little Renzo is turning into an infant ace. To the envy of all Renzo’s friends, Iacopo takes the boy home from the field on the back of his Moto Guzzi, before shooting off to a new woman, a mamma figure again, but pleasantly florid this time. In the bar he confides, somewhat embarrassed, that he is doing the boy a small painting of himself scoring a goal, for his birthday present. The frame is the goal, from behind, and the child diving across the picture to head home. Privately, I think this ridiculous, but when one day I take Michele to play with Renzo and see the thing, it turns out to be very good: the provincial twilight, the boys too small for the goal, that sense of comedy and poignancy you often get when watching children play an adult sport. Iacopo is talented, though for some reason the school has never hung his picture of the centenary.

Having given up the national sport (so young!), Michele toys for a while with baseball, which Stefano’s boy Beppe does, with American football, which Francesco’s Gigi does, and then with tennis, which Silvio’s Giovanni does. There’s nothing like the private sector for providing the full range of choice. Your only child must be accomplished, he must have confidence in himself, he must achieve. For a season, both Stefi and Michele go to courses at the swimming pool, where mothers jostle fiercely the whole morning on inscriptions day — there are so few places — but then don’t let their kids go to half the lessons because they have a blocked nose or a cough. A good fifteen minutes of the forty is spent on preparatory gymnastics. And ‘No playing in the pool!’

Finally, both children fall in love with roller skating, or with the tall sweet girl, Ilaria, who teaches it on the basketball rectangle that belongs to the church. It’s another occasion for buying expensive equipment: boot-skates, kneepads, elbowpads. There’s just the small problem for Michele that he is the only boy in the course. So strong is the gender conditioning in this country, where no tall black males skate gracefully through the parks or along city sidewalks, that everybody imagines skating is just for girls. So now not only is Michele going to hell because he doesn’t do the ora di religione , but he is considered effeminate because he likes skating. It’s funny, because there is absolutely nothing feminine about the way Michele skates, lumbering around pulling girls’ pigtails and pushing them in the back. The teacher spends half the lesson screaming at him. At least, he tells Beppe, he doesn’t have a ponytail. And he doesn’t go to dance class. He may skate, but he would never dance. Che schifo! What yuck! he laughs at Stefi, who loves to dance. She loves her little pink shoes and her little pink leotard that make her look so cherubically chubby when she whirls about her class, where there are no boys at all. For myself, I rather like the dance teacher; she is in her forties, separated, has rather a razzled look about her and always arrives stubbing out a cigarette. She doesn’t have that complacent righteousness that seems to infect most of those running children’s activities here, no doubt borrowed from the church. She doesn’t make a show of trying too hard.

Ilaria, on the other hand, like the football instructor, protracts her lesson deep into the winter evening, making the children practise pirouettes and balancing acts various. But at least watching fifteen little girls skate is infinitely preferable to watching a score of boys thump a wet ball at each other. It’s a pleasure to see how their faces glow in the dusk as the street lamps flicker on and the hills about the village suddenly loom. Sometimes Don Guido comes out of the canonica and watches them, too. After all, they’re on his property. Behind him, at exactly six, the fake bells in the red brick church start up. I suppose they must be on a timer. They contrive to be at once deafening and twee as they grind out the hymn:

E’ l’ora che pia la squilla fedel ,

le note ci invia dell’ave del ciel.. .