Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘You do it, son,’ I tell him, as if this were some kind of major concession, an extraordinary gesture of trust.

So Michele does it. He strikes beautifully, with a dexterity I would never have imagined. Immediately, the rod bends fiercely. The thing must be big. And without any instructions from me, Michele starts to play it, by instinct, letting out a little line, winding in a little more. The men on both sides of us are watching intently. I grab the big net I bought and slither down the bank. There’s a splash of tail, but Michele is careful not to lift it out of the water. He steers it towards me, slowly, surely. His eyes are so intent! In just one more minute we have caught a truly huge trout, perhaps the biggest anybody has caught this morning. As I lift the net, the thing is leaping and twisting and wriggling on the line. Michele’s face is ecstasy and triumph. To our left the efficient fellow who already has a dozen takes precious time out to say ‘ Bravo! ’ I could kiss him… for being so kind as to leave one for us.

But now I remember I didn’t buy the gadget for pulling out the hook. And I don’t have a cloth to hold the creature in, either. Nor do we have the net for keeping him alive under water while we go on fishing. We’ll have to kill him right away. Michele is down on his knees by the net diobon ing and admiring and saying he wonders if Huck Finn ever caught a fish so big. But when he takes the trout out, he can’t hold it. It leaps out of his hands into the muddy grass. For a moment it seems it might even make it back to the water. Overreacting, I trap the bastard with a full press that sinks him deep and slimy into the mud, then I force his mouth open and try to get the hook out. It’s brutal. I’m not used to this kind of thing. The trout bites me. The hook won’t come. Finally the line comes, but without the hook. And then I have to bang the monster’s head about a hundred times on a stone before he’s still enough to be forced into a plastic bag. ‘ Bravo, Diobon ,’ Michele says. Other people are sniggering. Frankly, I feel about as exhausted as a first-time murderer.

The fellow on our left catches another. He has it in his net in less than thirty seconds. Michele wants to go on fishing, but I suggest, with a little exaggeration, that the fish we’ve caught is big enough for the whole family. Let’s leave when things are going well and come back on a weekday when there aren’t so many people. He agrees. He picks up the plastic bag and walks very proudly through the clutter of the path, showing the fish to anyone who is interested.

It’s as I’m sitting in the car again, waiting for Michele to take a pee in the bushes, that the day’s last mystery is cleared up. Pulling out the car keys from my pocket, I find the keys have become tangled up with the little yellow ticket they gave me with its picture of a trout leaping out of the water after a fly. To pass a couple of seconds I set about reading the small print on the back:

REGULATIONS

No licence is required. Buy this permit before fishing and keep it with you. Those found without a permit will be charged double. The permit is personal and is valid for a whole morning or afternoon. Fishing is permitted only with one rod and one hook. Behave in a correct fashion. Weight and number of catch is unlimited.

The curiosity here is that on the other side of the same ticket there are actually squares to be checked to indicate one rod, two or even three… But it is the section ‘ Divieti ’, i.e. what you are not allowed to do, that really wakes me up.

It is forbidden to feed the fish in any way whatsoever.

It is forbidden to use a teaspoon and anchor to hook the fish [not something I was planning on].

All natural baits are allowed, but it is forbidden to use any metallic lure of any kind.

Transgressors of the above rule will be invited to leave the pool and their catch will be shared out amongst the other people fishing.

‘Michele! Michele!’ He comes running. I read him the rules. I explain to him that man to our left was definitely using a spinner, a metallic lure. We saw it every time he pulled in a fish. Theoretically, we could just go along and tell the long-haired fellow with the earrings and the man’s catch would be confiscated. They’d have to share it out, and since we reported him, we would surely be entitled to at least one more trout.

Michele is all for acting at once. He begins to shout. Ladro! Thief! But now I’ve got him excited, I have to go on to explain that, on second thoughts, there would probably be no point in reporting the matter to the long-haired fellow. It’s just a rule, Michele, I explain. Everybody there must have seen he was using a spinner, and nobody said anything. Nobody gives a damn…

Michele is disappointed in me. He thinks I’m just scared. But then I tell him that, actually, thinking about it, Stefano always had a spinner on one of his rods, didn’t he?

‘ Sai com’è , Michele,’ I say. He pouts and nods wisely. Perhaps he is beginning to understand…

In tiny print below the divieti it says: ‘The management cannot be held responsible for any theft that takes place on the premises. Damages to things and persons are covered by RAS insurance.’ Oddly enough, that is Nascimbeni’s company. I imagine the man hobbling down the bank to warn the management that a gravel pit is the kind of place where people could come to blows and hurt each other and then make claims against the management for not having imposed the rules properly.

At home Silvio applauds Michele on having caught a spectacular fish. La passione helped him do it. Silvio’s smile turns to a frown. ‘Just too bad the thing got smashed up so badly when you killed it.’

‘That was Papà,’ Michele confides. ‘Papà doesn’t know anything about fishing.’

The following day, Sunday, Michele chose our fishing trip as the subject for his weekend homework composition. For me it was a chance to observe how he saw events. Or at least how he felt those events should be presented. He wrote:

FISHING

When you go fishing you have to be very careful not to get tangled up with the line.

If you use a rod with a float it’s more boring because all you have to do is watch the float to see if it moves.

But if you use a small false metal fin then you have to keep turning the reel, and you get more fish.

You have to know how deep the water is where you’re fishing and you have to know how to cast.

WHEN THE FISH BITES

When the fish bites you see the float jump up and down in the water.

First you have to make a little tug with the rod and then you have to wind in the line until you can see the fish darting about in the water. Then you get the fish in the net. Then you get the fish with a cloth and you give it a bang on the head to kill it.

After that you put the fish in another net that goes in the water to keep the fish fresh.

Before that though, when you kill the fish you have to take the hook out of its mouth.

Then you start fishing again.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT

Rod, weights, hooks, worms (bait), float, two nets, line.

How knowledgeable it all sounds. As if it were a lesson he’d learnt. How experienced, too, and technical. And how reticent… Clearly, Michele has understood a great deal more than I imagined.

A curiosity of car travel is how it confuses the seasons. We are travelling south across the Pianura Padana, that great triangle of flat, chemically-fed farmland south of the Alps and east of the Apennines. The landscape is an oppressive geometry of rectangular fields laid out in rigid lines of maize or wheat or vines, unrelieved by hill or hedgerow. Even the fruit trees have been trained to spread their branches at right angles through only two dimensions, so that they look more like Jewish candlesticks than anything organic. Above them, the crisscross bristle of giant pylons is so in tune with the rest it might be just another machine-managed crop at a higher level of evolution.