Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Iphimedeia, the Medusa, the eternal return, the sharpness of figures against the light, like stark silhouettes on Greek vases, it seems one always has half a sense of myth by the Mediterranean, the land’s edge is also the edge of a timeless world of Latin archetypes.

Though I’m always lapsing back into my practical workaday Anglo-Saxon mentality. Having crawled exhausted out of the sea, I’m now toiling over a huge round sandcastle in several tiers with moat and perimeter wall and secret tunnels and dungeons. It’s a very English-looking thing. The kids join in. They love it, as I loved to do this with my own father and mother. So do other people’s kids. A tiny Patrizia helps Stefi find shells for the battlements. Somebody’s little Marcello is running back and forth with a bucket for water for the moat. Eventually, to my surprise a small crowd forms by the water’s edge to admire the flying buttresses, the crenellated walls. We’ve got it up to about three feet now. It’s a pretty big castle. People break off their strolls to stand and stare. Endeavour of this magnitude has considerable curiosity value here.

Later, back at the sunshade, we find Aunt Paola. Since we’re not in Pescara for long this year, she is letting us share her sunshade, a gesture almost as generous as letting somebody share your bathroom. And given that my father- and mother-in-law are away for a few days, she is eager to help me and, like all the Baldassarre family, to offer advice. After all, it’s a generally acknowledged truth in Italy that a man can’t be expected to look after children on his own for more than a couple of hours.

Zia Paola is old, white-haired, slightly hunched, discreet, gracious. Her voice is pleasantly low and gravelly. And the first thing she says is not to buy mozzarella on a Monday. It would be a mistake to buy mozzarella on a Monday because they might well have been keeping it in the shop over the weekend, and in this heat…

Also, I should be very careful about salad. She can tell me a place where I can get good fresh tomatoes and lettuces at a cheap price.

She speaks for some time and in great detail about shopping and menus. Rather than myself, it is the children who join in, already better at discussing food than I am: they explain how Mamma dresses the salad, which pasta they like best. Stefi is particularly eager. She always drinks some of Daddy’s wine, she says.

Paola promises she will bring me some local wine a friend makes. Then she warns me that I mustn’t use the towel after laying it in the sand. One can catch skin irritations in this way. God only knows what funguses there are in the sand. I shall have to wash it now and leave it to dry in direct sunlight. And on second thoughts, perhaps it would be better not to give the children mozzarella at all in this weather, not even if I buy it fresh on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, since in this kind of heat those things tend to ferment in the stomach.

Paola has been so kind I feel I must return the favour somehow, and seeing that she talks so constantly about food, I invite her to a restaurant. Perhaps tomorrow. With her daughter. But she declines the offer. She is too fastidiosa , she says. There are too many things she doesn’t like or can’t eat. Stefi says she feels exactly the same way. The little girl nods very sagely, damp hair falling over her eyes. For example, she doesn’t like runner beans, and Michele doesn’t like peas… ‘You never know,’ Paola is saying, ‘in a restaurant, how long the food has been in the freezer, whether they’ve washed their hands or not, what they’ve put in it to make it look nice. Eating out is so unhealthy.’ I decide I’d better not tell her that I am about to take the kids up to the terrace bar for their much-loved antipasto of pizzetta and Coca Cola.

For this is what the routine now demands: shower, aperitivo , antipasto, computer games, home.

I can’t recall the presence of showers on English beaches, but in today’s anal post-peasant Italy it is unthinkable that one should be in contact with something organic like seawater without then taking a thorough shower to clean off. More practically, there is the problem that salt on the skin can be very unpleasant when the temperature is up in the high thirties.

Here, then, is the only part of my children’s beach experience that involves something approaching heroism. As I said, the Medusa’s showers are cold, and what’s more, powerful. Either they’re off or they’re full on, drenching you with a pounding delivery of freezing water. Yet everybody seems to love it. People queue up by the four showers between terrace and bathing huts. They stand under the cold water and shriek. The children dance and scream. Then, after only a minute, perhaps even less, of intense cold on burning skin, they’re out already, laughing and shivering their way into bathrobes. It’s as if all that excitement of contact with the elements, that thrill of endurance, hardship, all those qualities our English parents hoped we would thrive on as children, were condensed here into a few shockingly icy seconds, the better to enjoy the sensual pressure of the sun afterwards, the splendid sense of well-being brought on by bright light and colour and abundant food.

‘ Una pizzetta rossa ,’ Stefi says, ‘ e quattro gettoni .’ Four tokens.

We’re standing at the bar. I order a bicicletta , a bicycle, which actually is nothing more than a mixture of a pink gingerino , some kind of bittersweet soda, and a very large glass of white wine, the kind of drink that would look out of place on a Saturday night in the Queen’s Head or the Pig and Donkey in Clapham or Stoke Newington, but that winks very colourfully here in the dazzling sun.

The fat boy serving has a T-shirt on that says, I’M A LATIN LOVER. I wish him well. His mother remembers to ask where my wife is and, on hearing the news that she’s expecting, expresses amazement at our coraggio . Secretly, I know she is imagining that this third child, six years after the second, is a mistake. Every Italian adult I have spoken to is convinced of that and will be all the more so if I bother to deny it.

‘It’s another girl,’ I tell her, since we know from the scan.

‘Oh well,’ she smiles, ‘you already have your maschietto .’

It’s so reassuring to know beforehand what people are going to say.

And the children’s boyish and girlish personalities are so evident now! Michele has grabbed his tokens to go and play his computer game at the far end of the terrace. He’s anxious to get in there before the crowd arrives. Stefi waits behind at the bar to pick up his pizza and Coca Cola for him. Then she will go and stand by the machine, and she will feed him and water him as he plays. It’s touching and somewhat frightening this sweet femininity she has. Obviously, she’s terribly impressed by the way he attacks the machine’s buttons and toggles, generating improbable martial arts in a figure called The Vigilante, who strides up and down New York subway carriages battering well-equipped crooks. Then the other children who huddle round are impressed because Michele can read the instructions and comments in English. Especially the bit when The Vigilante finally hits the deck and a doctor appears with caricature rimless glasses on his forehead and starts pressing fiercely on his barrel chest, while red letters flash: ‘If you want your hero to revive, you have thirty seconds to insert another token.’ Michele reads the message to the other boys. He has a way I have never managed to cure him of of slightly over accenting the ends of the words: ‘Iff you wanta yourr hero to reviv-ve…’ so that for a moment it seems the action really is happening in the Bronx. ‘You havva thirty…’ Stefi gets in the second token just in time, then claps when a particularly ugly thug goes down under a hail of spanner blows. Her admiration, her quiet supporting presence, holding her brother’s pizza and Coke, isn’t so far away from that of the bagnino ’s girlfriend…