Tim Parks - An Italian Education

All I have to do now, while the children get their daily dose of electronics, is sit and eat my pizzetta and drink my bicicletta , and wonder what I’m going to make for lunch. I sit. A large crowd of fifteen-year-olds are hanging around the jukebox, putting on favourite songs. By the end of the week I’ll know which girls are going to put on which songs. For it’s always the girls who put on the songs, though sometimes they may beg the money off a boy. One girl, still a child but with a woman’s body and elegance, is dancing, in a bikini that says MORE ENERGY round the waistband and again on a sort of tight sash affair beneath her breasts. She is beautiful. But the boys are perfectly relaxed about it. Like the bagnino and his girl perhaps, it’s not so much that they’re unimpressed as that they haven’t really noticed yet. They’re eating pizzetta and discussing the exams they just finished. Then I realise that more interesting to them than the women are all the fashion accessories they have about them: the silvered sunglasses hung over top pockets, the gold chains round neck and wrist, the Swatches and fluorescent headbands and pinhead earrings and purple money pouches and leather key rings…

All of a sudden the whole group decides to move over to the other side of the terrace and the phone, where everybody crowds round the dancing girl with her MORE ENERGY costume. She is about to make an important call. She lifts the receiver and dials. As she speaks, the others mouth encouragement or pull faces. Is she phoning a boyfriend? Is she trying to get her parents to let her stay out? She’s struggling not to laugh. The others are clowning wildly. And I think, one of the reasons I’ve stayed in Italy is that I believe, perhaps erroneously, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps merely in reaction to my own childhood of church halls and rainy weekends — I do believe that kids have a better time here, that adolescence is more fun here. Certainly I never saw a group of people so confident and at ease with themselves and their youth. I wish it for my children.

Then you pick up the paper someone has left and read a story that knocks you out, that prompts revisions. Still licking the pizza grease off my fingertips and sucking the ice block from the bicicletta , I’ve got half an eye on the kids, half on two men complaining about refereeing standards, one with AMO LUCIA tattooed on his shoulder — I love Lucia — when my attention is caught by the fact that it’s the very same name as the one in the big headline on the page I’ve turned. ‘LUCIA IMMACOLATA?’ it asks.

Lucia… Corriere della Sera describes her with endearing enthusiasm as a splendid Calabrian blonde, eighteen years old, the most sought after of her neighbourhood… The story goes like this. For reasons unspecified, Mother sent Lucia away to her aunt in Naples for a while at the beginning of summer. Result: everybody in her apartment block and street assumed that she was being quietly removed from the scene to have an abortion, or even to give birth. There’s a nice expression in Italian here, ‘ malelingue ’ — evil tongues, gossips — and what these evil tongues were saying was that Lucia was a slut. This distressed the mother, who was afraid that if everybody believed this slander, the girl wouldn’t easily be able to get married. She thus went to a gynaecologist at the main hospital in Reggio Calabria to have him examine the girl and give her an official, yes, official, ‘ Certificato di Verginità ’. With this in her hand she then went round to knock on all the doors of the estate and show it to people. Her daughter was a virgin, she said. She had the proof. The rumours must stop. But this was a mistake. Not only were the malelingue not impressed by this, but they immediately began to put it about that the mother must have paid the gynaecologist to produce the document; and given that she was a poor woman and widowed, the only way she could possibly have paid a professional man like that was in kind… her daughter’s, of course. Lucia went to bed with the gynaecologist to get her certificate of virginity! Understandably, this spicy paradox was all too much for the mother, who was now demonstrating that she did indeed have some savings by taking out legal action against the malelingue …

Reading this story under the shade of a tamarisk tree, sprawled in this lounge of light and shade, of dazzling colour and domesticated outsideness, I start to think about the whole question of virginity and what it might mean: is it different in different countries? I think of the age people lose it, the age my own children will lose it… Do I want to know when they do? No. No, I most certainly don’t. And this seems to me the point of the story. That surely we should not know whether Lucia is a virgin or not. It is none of our business. And we most certainly shouldn’t ask. A façade of innocence must be maintained while Lucia is allowed to do as she wishes, if she wishes, hopefully with good sense and within limits. Really, il certificato di verginità , like so many documents in Italian life (the one indicating the price of my house, for example), is only a rather crude means of shoring up that façade, re-establishing a generous official version that it would be folly to question. There may be elements of hypocrisy, but it does seem to me that this is the most civilised approach, and the most exciting. Lucia is a game lass and a virgin…

The girls and boys are still round the phone. Another young maiden is calling now. She has a butterfly tattooed just above her breast. Did Iphimedeia have a tattoo? One of the boys is trying to tickle the inside of her legs with a seagull feather. MORE ENERGY meanwhile has bought an ice lolly, which has made her lips swell to bright strawberry. Then the bagnino ’s girlfriend, amazingly without the bagnino , comes up to her and links arms. Ah, so they’re friends! And there is such a complicity and craft in their smiles, such female guile, can you really believe that they…

But then you see that expression in ten-year-olds sometimes, in six-year-olds even. As now, when my little daughter comes up to me, consciously flouncing her pleated blue dress, and says, ‘Papà-a, o Papà-a, wake up, Papà.’ She pops the sweetest kiss right on my lips, and immediately I know that she, too, wants an ice lolly. And that Michele has finished his game. Another morning at the beach is over. Now I must get back and make them lunch. Except that I’m overtaken by an extraordinary languor. Has the Medusa turned me to stone? It takes a heroic effort to recover such concepts as responsibility, to deny the children their lollies, to insist on salad and mozzarella back home.

‘And it won’t ferment in your stomach,’ I manage to say, when Stefi objects. ‘That’s just Zia Paola fussing too much.’ I love mozzarella. And it’s easy. As we walk past three rocking horses, past the bubble gum machine, past MORE ENERGY examining some unimaginable blemish on the bagnino ’s girl’s shoulder, Michele describes with the most innocent enthusiasm how he just beat more than twenty crooks to death with a crowbar…

The seafront road under vertical sunshine. The sense of chaos one so often gets in Italy upon leaving the ceremony of bar or restaurant for the no-prisoners anarchy of the street. We stand at the kerb. It’s dangerous. I have to point out to Michele that a man on a motorbike who has both hands behind his head to adjust his ponytail (a crash-helmet is strapped to the pillion) is in no position to stop at a zebra crossing. Even if he wanted to. Wait, Michele. Wait, Stefi. Choose the driver you’re going to challenge. A fat man in a Mercedes will not want his bumpers bloody…