Tim Parks - An Italian Education

On the wooden walls around me are sad stuffed animals and a couple of framed fish, then one or two certificates, the inevitable shelf of cycling, angling and football trophies, and a corner dedicated to muddled photographs of parties apparently held in the ristorante . The bar amounts to six scattered tables with red-and-white check plastic cloths and a game of table football.

I go to the counter to pay, but there’s nobody there. I wait and notice a board over the till that gives the fishing prices. For one rod, twelve thousand; for two, fifteen, for three, eighteen. No wonder the others come in groups!

A girl appears. She’s small, surely too young to be working. And indeed she can’t give me my ticket, she says. But then it turns out that she can make me a cappuccino. I decide to go for it. With no alternative, I take one of the prepackaged croissants from a display that seems to be made out of fifties dish racks.

The Arena is lying open on a table, so I may as well sit down and read till someone comes to take my money. I spoon sugar in my coffee, then have a fight with the packaging of the croissant. Just when I’m finally set to enjoy myself for a couple of minutes, I discover that the coffee has been made with long-life milk. I hate long-life milk. Despite which — is this possible? — it seems to be off. This is awful. But then it occurs to me that the bar probably hasn’t had to serve a cappuccino for years. The adolescents by the pinball machine are drinking Coca Cola and the one or two older men wine, or coffee with wine in it. The croissant has the consistency of overboiled potatoes.

But the paper has a story to cheer me up. A man in some small town in Piedmont phoned his wife with a strangled voice to say he had been kidnapped. She must await further instructions and on no account phone the police. She phoned the police. The police made enquiries and discovered that the husband had warned his boss and work colleagues that he would be away from the office for the week. Within twelve hours they had found the man with his young and, one trusts, delightful mistress in a seaside resort on the coast above Genova. In a statement the man admits to having made a brutta figura …

Then amazingly, because this is generally an asphyxiatingly Catholic paper, the journalist proceeds to enthuse about how such stories demonstrate that the sun has still to set on traditional Latin passion and imagination. In what other country in the world, he asks, could such a thing happen? Indeed. For my own part I am already rehearsing my presentation of the story across Zia Natalina’s kitchen table. ‘ Santa patata , Signor Teem,’ she will say, ‘ davvero non c’è piu religione! ’ And I will say: ‘When he could have just pretended he was off on a fishing trip…’ Far from imagination, it sounds like folly to me.

An unsavoury young fellow appears at the till. He has long hair in a thick ponytail and wears clogs that he deliberately drags on the floorboards, even when standing still. His tattoo is an eagle, and he has three earrings in one ear and a St Christopher round his neck. He gives me a small square piece of yellow paper, puts a cross in the square where it says 1 rod and then writes the date. Already guilty that I’ve been too long, I stuff the thing in my pocket, buy Michele a bar of chocolate for his breakfast and head off.

About a hundred people have arrived since I went into the bar. Poor Michele is now seriously hedged in with a new fellow on his right tending three rods and having thus paid eighteen thousand to our twelve. Everybody has denim jackets over overalls, and most have little peaked caps with the name of a football team or tractor company. There are chuckles of laughter and upturned canteens. Nobody seems to be taking the fishing very seriously except for the fellow on our left, the only one constantly casting and winding in. Michele, poignantly holding the rod, limp line drifting near the bank, whispers, outraged, to tell me the man has already caught four big trout, while minnows have eaten all his bait as many times! And he has mosquito bites all over his feet. I should never have told him to wear sandals.

There are tears in the boy’s eyes. Then the fellow with the three rods to our right, unanswerably large and burly, complains that Michele’s line is drifting into his. Michele winds in and casts again in bitter silence. To cheer him up I point out that at least he is casting well now. He shrugs his shoulders and refuses to speak to me, munching his chocolate with the rod tucked under one arm.

Fifteen fruitless minutes later I finally get the explanation to the morning’s various enigmas: Why were some men round the pit reading the La Gazetta dello Sport as if they hadn’t come to fish at all? Why were the adolescents playing pinball instead of sitting by their rods? Why did one hundred people arrive between eight and eight-fifteen?

Answer: because eight-thirty is the time when, on Saturday (we have only been on Easter holiday weekdays with Stefano), they throw in the fish. Only now will the feast begin. The kill…

An old tin dinghy appears from the top end of the pool. The same long-haired fellow who took my money revs the outboard unnecessarily sending the boat swerving into the centre of the pool so that everybody has to hurry to their lines. In his haste Michele jerks his out of the water and gets it tangled round the fence again. Now he really is crying with rage. Because now is the moment we could have caught something, and if only…

I don’t wait to hear but set about slicing through an impossible tangle and setting up from scratch.

The long-haired fellow kills his outboard and stands with great panache in his wobbly boat. He dips a bucket into two big plastic tubs, fore and aft, full of trout. He chucks the wriggling fish now over the front of the boat, now over the back, now to one side, now to the other, in a very approximate gesture of fair distribution, while the men who have dropped their chat and their papers and jumped to their feet, all shout, ‘ Diobon , chuck a few over here, over here, Diobon …’ With a snigger the lad running the Ichthyic Agricultural Venture tugs his outboard into a roar that sends a cloud of oil smoke drifting across the pit and races back five metres to the shore. Presumably, he doesn’t have a paddle in the boat.

Working feverishly, I have the rod re-armed before anybody has caught more than three fish, though the terribly earnest fellow to our left is just pulling in a fourth. Michele is beside himself, but casts beautifully. He gets his little float right in the middle of the pool, just as the wild flurry calms down. Apparently, the remaining fish have realised that it might be unwise to snatch at all those maggots. We wait. Nothing. But by now I’ve lost all concern about Michele’s disappointment. The worst has already happened. There’s nothing to be done. No, now I’m positively savouring how awful it all is, secretly hoping that we will never have to come to this barbaric place again.

‘Another half an hour and we’re off,’ I tell him. He nods, miserably, gripping the rod tight. He helps himself to another piece of chocolate, staring tearfully at the now motionless water. I watch an oil stain ever so gently uncurl. Half an hour, then I can leave. All around the successful fishermen are beginning to relax and chat. One or two head off. Others are examining their sandwich boxes and wondering if three fish is enough to explain themselves to their wives.

Such, and so desolate, is the situation when Michele gets a bite.

There can be no mistaking it. The float goes down like a stone. I’m all nerves again.

‘You!’ Michele shouts. ‘Papà, you do it! Diobon! ’

His mixture of Italian and English has everybody looking at us again. But I’m not going to be held responsible for another debacle.