Tim Parks: An Italian Education

Dr Maroni has a way of twiddling his thumbs while smiling in an avuncular, slightly priestly fashion. He asks her what exactly she felt went wrong. She describes the appalling back pains she experienced, the terrible contractions, then the feeling of desolation in the small and rather shabby sala travaglio , the labour room.

‘Was your husband there?’

‘Yes, but in the end a pain is a pain,’ she says, rather too ambiguously it seems to me.

The doctor will not stop smiling, his face all reassurance. ‘It’s a question of practice,’ he says. ‘Practice, practice, practice…’ I fervently hope my wife won’t feel she needs to repeat events of this kind ad infinitum until she has mastered the technique.

Then a voice from the back asks the question that is uppermost on everybody’s mind: is it true that there is no sala rianimazione at the doctor’s small provincial hospital, no intensive care unit, and no facility for immediate heart surgery on the newborn child in the event of this being necessary?

The doctor frowns. After stressing the naturalness of childbirth this is not the kind of question he wanted to hear, but to duck it would be to lose almost his entire following. There wouldn’t be another birth in his hospital for the next hundred years. In the event of an emergency, he says, and it is costing him some effort now to maintain his smile, there is a helicopter at the hospital of Borgo Trento in Verona that can be at his hospital in approximately five minutes and back at Borgo Trento in a further five. Since it takes at least forty minutes to set up an operating theatre and find the necessary surgeons for a delicate operation, the baby is thus just as safe being born out of town as in the centre. If not safer, since there they tend to induce birth with a drip and use every technological barbarity to impose their will on this natural event, rather than simply letting it happen. Not to mention those fierce lights when the baby emerges…

While many further questions are asked about the nature of muscle contractions and its relation to breathing, about diet, about the value of red lighting and low music and nice soft double beds in the delivery room, it’s clear that what most people in the group are meditating upon as the evening draws to a close are those crucial seconds when somebody decides to call the emergency service at Borgo Trento, when somebody else has to start a helicopter engine, when doctors have to rush out onto the dark tarmac in the cold night air with a tiny newborn child in their arms…

Because for Italians pregnancy is, inescapably, a pathology, and childbirth its crisis and resolution. The lengths Dr Maroni has to go to convince us to the contrary can only serve as confirmation. His is a voice crying in the wilderness, defining the wilderness for those who hadn’t noticed it. The couples we met at his little sessions used him the way some people use homeopathic medicines: as a sort of fashionable and politically correct addition to the real thing, but not a basket one would seriously consider putting very many eggs in. And if the man is under investigation now for neglect, which I am sure he is not guilty of, it can only be because somebody who had a sad experience is convinced, and was probably always convinced, that childbirth should only take place in the centre of a huge concentration of technological resources and expertise. If it went okay for the Madonna in her stable that was merely because she was delivering the son of God. After all, she never tried again, did she? To those conceived by more orthodox methods the state owes every possible logistical support (as afterwards it owes every child an education, medical care, a steady job, a pension, TV entertainment and a funeral). Nowhere could a nation’s determination to forget the precariousness of its peasant past and embrace the protective mystique of modern science be more evident than in Italian attitudes to childbirth… after which infancy may be seen as a long and carefully guarded period of convalescence.

Contrary to popular belief, then, the Italian child is not born into a splendid world of spontaneity, fun and sensual delight, but into a tight space of immense caution, inhibition, and a suffocating awareness of everything, but everything, that can go wrong.

Not to mention how much it will all cost.

It was thus that I was persuaded, by solemn neighbours and employers, and of course my concerned father-in-law, that if I insisted on having a second child (folly became madness when we arrived at a third), the time had come for me to take the whole question of insurance more seriously. My accountant agreed, remarking that in terms of tax relief I would save only the equivalent of about twenty-five pounds a year by having another bundle of joy (there is no Child Benefit in Italy). He pointed out the advantages of being able to reduce my taxable income by the few million lire I would pay into an insurance scheme, and he recommended, as Italians in their eagerness to do favours always will, someone I could go to: an agent, Ragioniere Nascimbeni. Since Nascimbeni means ‘well-born’ I decided to take this as a good omen.

I telephoned Ragioniere Nascimbeni. Generally, it is not easy to make appointments in Italy, since it is important for the person offering a service to appear to be extremely busy, and hence successful. Any shortcomings in the service, in terms of slowness, will thus seem to be a guarantee of its qualities. I have even had a courier service in Verona tell me that they cannot come to pick up a package for forty-eight hours because they are so busy, and of course they are so busy because they are so fast. It seems pointless arguing with such logic. Nascimbeni, however, and to his immense credit, must be one of the most amenable men in the world. He was extremely, yes, extremely busy, there was simply no point in my going to his office where he was ‘under an avalanche of work’, but he would come to our house immediately he had finished for the day. Yes, that very evening. Would nine-thirty be too late? I was suitably impressed.

Ragioniere Nascimbeni ( ragioniere means accountant, or more precisely, someone who has completed the kind of high school that concentrates most of all on accountancy. It does not mean that the person in question is a full-blooded accountant, since that would entail a university degree which would confer the more enviable Dottore. Ragioniere is thus the least impressive of those titles — Ingegnere, Avvocato, Architetto, Professore , etc. — that Italians like to place before their names to confer a little importance and pomposity, in this case so little importance and so hollow a pomposity that one feels it might be wiser not to draw attention to the fact at all)…

Ragioniere Nascimbeni arrives right on time. I buzz him in and stand outside the door at the top of the marble stairs to guide him to the right apartment. He comes up with an unusual clatter, a curious, rolling gait. I watch with interest as he attacks the first flight, disappears, then sways into view on the second. By the time I’m face to face with him at the top of the fourth, I’m beginning to appreciate why this man is genuinely so busy and successful in his field: he is himself a walking advertisement for just how much can go wrong in life, the perfect contradiction of the happy providence suggested by his name. One look at Nascimbeni and you know you need insurance. And perhaps he comes to your house, rather than seeing you from behind his desk in town, just to remind you how difficult it can be for a man to climb stairs, to cross a room, to find a comfortable chair.

I said ‘walking advertisement’, but I should have said ‘lurching’. Nascimbeni has the built-up shoe of the polio victim. He throws his limp leg forward, leaning on it only when it is rigidly straight, bringing round his good leg as rapidly as possible. The impression is of someone negotiating a ship’s deck in a storm. His eyes behind thick glasses squint severely. Every few seconds he blows his nose, breathing hard.