Tim Parks - An Italian Education

We drive on. As the morning passes, the sense of oppression is intensified by a blinding glare of summer light, a light that strips the land bare and leaves it vulnerable, simmering, as if heated to boiling point in some monstrous industrial process. The autostrada shoots across it straight and white as a white-hot poker, flashing with the dazzle of sunlight on racing windscreens. In the car, the fan blows warm, sticky air through the ventilator ducts. Excited and fractious, the children fight over sunscreens to stick on the windows. Rita distributes fruit juices from the freeze box.

Yet in the midst of this blinding heat, the road signs are warning you of fog. White blobs at the side of the road measure out stretches of a hundred metres each. If visibility is down to three blobs, reduce speed to eighty kilometres an hour. If to two, sixty. If to one, forty. When you cross a bridge, another sign says to watch out for ice. There is the little image of the skidding car. Further south, past Bologna and then Rimini, when you’ve joined the great Adriatico highway that pushes right down to Bari, it’s the wind they tell you to be careful of, coming out of the long tunnels or crossing the huge viaducts that span dry river valleys above a shimmering blur of sea. Danger, gusts of wind! There is a little picture of a humpbacked car careening on two wheels. But the only wind today comes from the polished chase of bright metal packed with holiday-makers heading south. Then even that peters out as the traffic slows and sticks in a viscous summer jam. The children fight and scratch over a water bottle. An incongruous triangle tells me that if it’s snowing I must have chains on my wheels.

Hot weather, cold signs… It’s as if they were trying to remind you of the great epic of the turning seasons, how the country lies still under fog and frost in winter, then boils in summer’s vertical sunshine. Or perhaps the signs are there to console us that July heat is only fleeting, as unimaginable in mid-winter as snowflakes are today. Or perhaps, again, somebody wants to have you reflect that the road is always there even when you aren’t, embraces a range of experience you know nothing of. But this is hardly a conversation one can hope to divert the children with. Just as it would be pointless to tell them how this reminder of life’s different seasons prompts memories of English family holidays years ago when my parents, brother, sister and I set out on a Ribble bus from Blackpool (incredibly, the service was known as the Gay Hostess), peering through rain on the windows at a Lancashire landscape whose lush wetness was always perceived as a challenge. How would we manage to survive in tent, or cottage or caravan for three windswept seaside weeks? What adventures would we have in our determination to stick it out? Cows glowered in fields, huddled against a wind that blew winter and summer alike in that country. And perhaps on some mental highway, as one clutched the handrail of the seat in front, there might have been incongruous signs referring to other periods of life, waiting for other seasons to be relevant, signs saying: in the event of marriage, reduce speed and drive with due caution; in the event of children, steer right and proceed with immense patience.

For Michele and Stefi are now pulling each other’s hair over which of the soft toys Zia has given them is whose. Rita tries to sort them out, kindly at first, then furiously. The heat and light are getting on everybody’s nerves. As a father, however, squinting against this impossible glare, I can rejoice in another difference between these holidays and those of my own youth: in those days, in England, Father was present all holiday, he saw and suffered it all, while I, like so many Italian men, am just driving my family down to the sea, the better to escape back home to a month’s steady work and solitary amusement. When in Rome do as the Romans, especially when they have a tradition that turns out to be so convenient.

School ends the second week in June. The children hang up their fluorescent backpacks, perform end-of-school plays that mix self-congratulatory and politically correct messages. Stefi’s is about a treasure hunt with all kinds of colourful people fighting over what is announced by a wizard to be the ultimate treasure. When finally discovered, the booty is in the form of a huge egg. The greedy treasure hunters break it open only to discover, inside, a papier mâché dove with the word ‘ PACE ’ written on it… peace. An army of father photographers record their infants’ bewilderment.

Meanwhile, the sun blazes mercilessly down on Via della Primule where Mario and Silvio are fixing up a television on Mario’s terrace so they can watch the World Cup outside, of an evening. The children take refuge from the heat by splashing in a big paddling pool, into which, from our balcony two storeys up, Rita tips buckets of cold water. The children shout and wrestle. But as soon as they are out of the water, the sun is too hot to stay in the garden. It’s thirty-seven degrees and wickedly humid. They have to return to the gloom of their rooms, where half-closed shutters keep out the sun.

The heat is all conditioning. It’s not the clean heat of sharp light and shade but the sultry, dog-day variety. The sun is a blotchy white impurity in a molten metal sky. The air presses around you, so that it is more difficult to leave the house now than in the bitterest winter weather. Everybody buys big roll-down awnings to protect their balconies, and there’s the problem that these must all be the same colour to preserve the aesthetic harmony of Righetti’s white-stuccoed palazzi . In the end the decision is for grey and yellow stripes. And still it’s too hot to stay out on the balcony, except perhaps late in the evening.

As July sets in, a long and elegant species of wasp arrives. The locals call them matonsin — little bricks. At five-minute intervals they drift in through the kitchen window and buzz loudly across the sitting room to the bottom of the stairs. In her smartest summer dress, Stefi goes to open the small, pretty, pink wool handbag she likes to carry when she goes to the pasticceria or more occasionally with her nonna to Mass, or with Natalina to the cemetery. Only to drop it in fright. There are two of those fearful beasts in there! And a horrible big lump of dirt. They have been building a nest. They are called matonsin because they carry little bricks of mud between their long legs. Stefi cries. She pokes her bag with a plastic arrow. It’s hard when a vanity accessory turns out to be a den of stings.

On the other hand, Michele does have the pleasure of seeing a vipera at last. It slithers across the tarmac just beyond the automatic gate and disappears into a crack before he can find a stick. So he claims. And it was that long, Diobon! He talks about it for days and refuses to go out without his knife.

The cicalas drone, so loudly. All night the crickets whirr. With the windows open to get some air you have to listen to other people’s televisions now dragged out onto balconies and terraces. Later, dogs bark nervously. After midnight the still air seems to hold and prolong the sound… of samba tonight, from the Centro Primo Maggio. It’s incredibly loud! Unable to sleep for the heat, I decide to walk down to see what’s going on, perhaps enjoy myself. Five adolescents are dancing without enthusiasm in front of huge loudspeakers. Village life…

It’s hard to get the children to bed. One treat they have learnt to insist on is what Rita calls il cambio della guardia , the changing of the guard. It’s something you can see from the big terrace balcony. Around nine-thirty, the swallows are still swooping and diving and twittering across the cornfield just beyond the garden. They have a wonderful way of making the twilight seethe, making dusk seem busy and optimistic. Michele and Stefi watch, rapt, gloating over their escape from bed, sucking iced tea through straws. Then, at some imperceptible deepening of the shadows, or cooling of the air, the swallows are no longer there. Or are they? The space beyond the balcony is still full of diving and swooping. But it’s different now. In the twinkling of an eye the swallows have metamorphosed into bats. Il cambio della guardia! It’s remarkable how similar yet how different the two movements are, the swallows communicating joy, light-heartedness, the bats, with their mothy flittering, nervousness and unease. Stefi, at six, tells me the day is like the swallows, the night is like the bats…