Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Still, that old spoilsport, reason, does get the boy to the truth in the end. Reason and, as it turns out, Zia, who is anything but a spoilsport. For on the evening of December 13th Zia Natalina is there at the school gate to give the children Santa Lucia presents of her own: a compendium of boardgames for both, an aeroplane kit for Michele, a cosmetics set — lipsticks, eyeshadows, powders — for the six-year-old Stefi. She’s enthralled. I’m appalled. Especially when the gift comes from this woman who’s always complaining about younger women running off with older men. But Michele returns home thoughtful.

He says: ‘Zia gave me a present, Papà, for Santa Lucia.’

‘Great.’

‘It must have cost at least fifty thousand lire.’

‘That’s very generous of her. I must phone and thank her.’

‘Last year, when Nonno came, he gave me a car.’

‘Yes, that’s right, he did. That was very kind of him.’

He pauses: ‘But you and Mamma didn’t give me anything…’

‘Ah.’

Rita comes in.

‘Other people give me things, but you never do.’

Rita and I exchange glances. What can we say? We admit we’re ungenerous, or we admit that Santa Lucia…

Michele smiles. He sidles up to us. He’s big, healthy, ungainly, ready to face the trauma now. He hugs his mother. ‘You gave me the fishing rod, didn’t you?’

What can one do at this point but capitulate? ‘But don’t tell Stefi,’ we insist. ‘You mustn’t tell Stefi. Don’t spoil it for her, yet.’

Thus does one spread the Western idea that the real initiate is he who knows there is nothing to know: Father Christmas today, true love tomorrow. The very next morning, while sharing breakfast with her Carabambola, who’s rather romantically been christened Stellina, Stefi says, ‘Thank you so much for giving me the pushchair as well, Papà. Michele told me.’ And you can see that for her it hasn’t been a trauma at all. Chi si accontenta …

Nor will it stop Stefi writing letters to the saint. Only she writes with a little more shrewdness now, a little more awareness of how much can be spent. Indeed, she’s already suggesting they should write letters to Babbo Natale. Michele, with a sidelong glance at me, agrees. They start: ‘Caro Babbo Natale…’ The charade, it appears, is attractive, even when you know it is a charade, and though in past years we’ve told them that Santa Lucia and Father Christmas have agreed on a strict territorial divide, and hence they can’t expect any more from the old fellow than they can from Nonno, who never comes at Christmas, this year we decide to let them write the letters with the strict injunction that they must appreciate that Father Christmas has very little left to spend…

It takes Michele about ten seconds to start putting together a scaffolding of reasoning for this innovation. ‘After all,’ he tells me, ‘we’re English as well as Italian, so we have to get something from Father Christmas too.’

‘Write the letter in English, then,’ I tell him, ‘and he might be more generous.’

Back to ricatti … Michele thus writes his first words in English. Endearingly, he employs Italian phonetics: ‘Dir Fava Crissmas, mi an Stefi hav torccd an we ar agri that wan a sled so Dady can teik us to the maountins. Giust won present for to is not veri costos an yu laik sno so much am scior you will giv us a sled…’

He does. We take it up beyond the snow line above Velo Veronese on Christmas afternoon and park next to the cross that guarantees whoever prays there a hundred-day indulgence. We slide down the slopes with a thousand other people on sleds and toboggans and lorry inner tubes and plastic bags. The air is full of shrill Madonna! s and Dio Santo! s, and Santa Patata! s and O Gesù! s as our sled turns over in an explosion of powdery snow.

But our real Christmas present comes as a result of an entirely different kind of appeal. On picking up the children from skating the last day of school, Rita falls into conversation with Don Guido, and it occurs to her to mention poor Hristo to him, cooking for himself in our basement with all that paint around that could blow up any minute and nowhere to go to the toilet. It’s incredible how long it’s been going on. Every week, Righetti promises that the imbianchino has promised that the man is about to leave, but he never does, and it’s not hygienic and with all those children in the condominium, all those families, however nice a boy he is…

Don Guido asks: ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ As though to say, Oh ye of little faith. Or perhaps, There are advantages to being initiates in this community you know. Or even, If only the Catholic Church had already existed, no way Christ would have been born in a stable… And in very short order the priest finds a home for the delighted Hristo. He’s persuaded someone to let a room at a reasonable price, perhaps to accumulate a little indulgence…

Meanwhile, back in Via delle Primule — where every middle-class sitting room has a little nativity scene and Stefi, despite her determination to opt out of the ora di religione , has been spending all her money on oxen and asses and a golden angel who hangs by an almost invisible thread from a bookshelf above the infant Christ — back in Via delle Primule, everybody in the condominium gets together and we decide we will rent the cellar ourselves as a group, thus pushing out the imbianchino (since Righetti gives condominium owners priority) before he can move in any more Christ figures. ‘That’s probably all Righetti intended in the first place,’ Francesco says knowingly. ‘To force us to rent the place. To maximize his investment.’ Naturalmente .

But the children are sad to see Hristo go. He played football and ruffled their hair and Michele said he reminded him of Jim in Huckleberry Finn . As does Michele’s written English for me…

There are those who catch fish and there are those who do not. I am one of those who do not. I have never in my life caught a fish, unless perhaps it was minnows and tiddlers in a net as a child. Even then they had a miserable habit of slipping through the holes. But Michele?

Michele has fallen in love with the idea of fishing because so many of our neighbours and friends depart early on Sunday mornings, returning towards lunch with bags full of trout. Silvio has had a big sink installed in his garage so he can wash them there beside the second car he has bought now that he is certain a second child is financially beyond him. Giovanni and Gigi and my Michele and Martino and Stefi and Gianluca jostle about him as the sleek things come slapping and slithering out onto the shiny porcelain. They peer and wonder as Silvio plunges his strong thumbs deep inside a pale belly. Then he has every imaginable gadget and tool for finishing the job, things I shall never know the name of in any language.

The children love it. They know that the surrounding landscape is crisscrossed with streams and ditches; they know that when you cycle by on a Sunday every stream has a score of fishermen along it with their waders and bristling tackle boxes, their catch nets trailing in the current. Fishermen, I must insist. Not fisherpersons. Women here don’t fish. Santa Lucia has brought Michele a present that will initiate a new relationship with Papà, an introduction into an exclusively male world. If only Papà knew anything about fishing…

The first thing we need, Silvio explains, is a licence. He details the complications, the expense, patiently but with half a smile on his handsome face. There are different licences for different kinds of fishing, different numbers of rods, different territory. And for children and adults. Of course, he explains, the child’s licence is much cheaper, the problem being that if I then accompany Michele, how can I convincingly demonstrate to a possible inspector that it is really the boy fishing with his rod and not myself taking advantage of his licence to fish on the cheap. Especially if the inspector should come along right at the moment when I’m holding the rod while Michele pees or something… In the end I may as well get another rod for myself and my own licence and do things seriously.