Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The hour the faithful bell rings out

Heaven’s Ave Maria to us devout…

Does anybody actually say the angelus when the plodding tune chimes? Does Don Guido? He stands thoughtfully amongst the parked cars watching the skaters. When he greets me now, he seems resigned to my family’s nonconformity, reinforced perhaps by Michele’s towering presence amongst the skating girls. In any event, he nods pleasantly and makes no mention of catechism, and afterwards he is perfectly happy if some of the children want to go and see his rabbits and guinea pigs in hutches by the tall brick wall of the church. Stefi likes to do that. She loves soft furry things. And she likes it if he gives her a caramella . But she does not like being pinched. Why does this priest feel he has to pinch little children…?

Sometimes I wonder if all their lives the angelus, heard everywhere in Italy at six o’clock, will remind my children of nothing more, nothing less, per carità , than roller skating at winter dusk.

Michele’s piano teacher is also called Ilaria. We bought a piano because we hoped the children would learn. Indeed, we would learn ourselves. And this was very un-Italian of us, for almost nobody in Italy has a piano. Trying to explain the exorbitant prices, the man who sold it to us insisted the English bought ten times the number of pianos, of musical instruments in general, the Italians did. I suspect this has to do with the obsession here, which is also a modern obsession, that it’s simply not worth doing anything unless you can do it at the highest level. You play football seriously from the earliest age. Or not at all. You emulate Roberto Baggio, or whoever is the hero of the day — Gianluca Vialli, Beppe Signori — your parents shrieking from the touchline, waving bottles of expensive mineral drinks that will improve your performance and protect your health. Or you go swimming to join the swimming team. You do the appropriate exercises. In case you wanted just to play, the pools are strictly divided into lanes. And if you go to the BMX course as Michele did one year to use the ambitious dirt track they have at Centro Primo Maggio, then you must take part in the races, with your crash helmet and fashionable stretch pants and kneeguards, until in your teens you graduate to one of the sports bikes that race through the village and up into the gruelling mountains almost every Sunday in summer. You must be hailed by megaphones as you pass the makeshift grandstand in the piazza , preceded and followed by fat ex-champions on motorbikes keeping people out of your way. You must win cups and medals and feature on expensively framed team photographs (the barber’s shop is full of them and likewise a thousand bars). You must do your sport, whatever it is, like they do it on TV. Otherwise, it’s not worth it. It’s just not worth the sacrifici . Don’t even start. Hence the frustration of so many parents on the touchline — not like that, like this! — and hence, ultimately, the child’s withdrawal to the computer games in the Bar Centrale, where it’s not quite so difficult to excel. There is always a band of burnt-out teenagers in front of the screens, and the game they have now, Michele tells me excitedly, for he loves computer games, is that if you do everything right, a video woman takes all her clothes off. Big Gigi, the boy downstairs, is scornful of Michele: if you want to see naked women, all you have to is turn on the TV late at night. On Channel Seven…

At their age the only notions I had of naked women came from the pages of the National Geographic showing tribal dances and Amazon pygmies.

Since the piano is notoriously hard to get good at, since the powers that be hardly ever show it on TV and never on computer games (the girl does not undress on a piano or to piano music), since no-one listens to that kind of stuff any more anyway, it’s not surprising that nobody in Italy buys them, and that it’s miserably difficult to find a teacher. Who would bother to learn the piano just to teach someone else, particularly if they show no signs of being a star? Particularly if there are no state jobs available teaching piano in schools.

Our first discovery, Marzia, was a brilliant pianist but contemptuous. Everything you learnt, it was as if you had taken a step back. You had only discovered how much more there was to know. ‘ Non è come si deve ,’ she would shake her head when you played some new piece you’d learnt. It’s not as it should be. The way when Baggio and company are sending us to sleep with some particularly dull performance, the commentator will say, ‘ Questo non è calcio come si deve .’ Not football as it should be.

The second teacher, Gaetano, was merely indifferent. He nodded vaguely. He might say bravo in a flat voice you imagined was ironic until you realised how utterly distant he was. Then he had the irritating habit of saying, ‘Now what?’ and he would open the book some fifty pages on and play some hugely complicated piece right through and absolutely come si deve . Nothing could be more humiliating.

At which point enter the minute Ilaria, with her hoarse boyish voice and dialect accent. The reason Ilaria is teaching, and doing it quite well, is that she herself got the worst of both worlds, the old and the new, as far as attitudes to achievement are concerned. One of five children from a quarrying family in the mountains, she showed an unaccountable interest in the piano as a little girl, taking lessons from the local priest. He saw she was good and encouraged her. It was one of the more positive roles the church once had. Throughout her teens she gave maths lessons to younger children to save up for piano lessons from a proper teacher. Four maths lessons to one piano lesson. Her parents would not pay for the lessons, not because they didn’t have the money, but because then they would have to give the other children something equivalent. That age-old obsession with tit-for-tat accountancy. Anyway, this was before concern with one’s children’s advancement became so fashionable, before one only had one child.

Eventually she got to the academy, but didn’t have the financial support to finish quickly. She did other jobs to stay alive, graduated late, missed any chance of becoming a professional. So now with the modern mentality that anything you do must be done perfectly, she has a low opinion of herself. She insists, playing brilliantly, that she doesn’t play very well. She imagines you want to play the most difficult pieces in the shortest possible time. It took quite a while before we could make clear to her that we were perfectly happy even with the slowest bumbling progress, as long as the children felt happy about it, as long as they learnt to savour the music a little. After a year Stefi plays a fairly decent ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, while Michele finds that yet another ‘effeminate’ activity can be fun. And he feels no nostalgia at all for the now flood-lit field where Iacopo has to shiver on the sidelines waiting for little Renzo to score his goals.

It’s curious, because I remember as a child giving up my own piano lessons to play football. And I would now, too, if only there was anybody to play with without becoming a fanatic…

Four-fifteen. The parents wait around the school gates. Everywhere there are cars double-parked. It’s problematic because the road is narrow just here, and cars are getting bigger. Then the bell goes and the children burst out with their lumpy backpacks. Another five minutes and the traffic is chaotic, fighting its way to a score of destinations: the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the gym in the other school where Stefi dances, the basketball rectangle for skating. One child is playing baseball while another is on his BMX. One learns archery while another is at pre-ski classes.