Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Does all this sound terribly Gormenghast and unattractive, terribly primitive and grim? I do hope not. For the truth is that Nonno’s property has a charm all its own. The tall, waving grasses, the fig trees, the abandoned bric-a-brac, they instill a feeling (reinforced by fifties fittings and piping and furniture and cutlery) that time stopped long ago, that there really isn’t and indeed never could be any reason for hurry. I’m pleased that the children can get to know this place. Our world in Verona is so modern and middle-class, so restrictive and clean, with so many things the children mustn’t spoil. Whereas here…

As we’re hanging out the bathing costumes, Zia Maria and Zio Franco appear. The relatives always visit more when Nonno and Nonna are away, and though they chat politely to me and politely marvel at my ability to feed and clothe two children, it’s really Michele and Stefi they want to see. Franco has brought them some metal puzzles he’s made. Perhaps sixty-five now, Franco took an offer of early retirement from the railways some thirty years ago and has done nothing since. Nothing, that is, if you don’t count his memorising all the jokes in every week’s Settimana enigmistica and his ability to mend fridges and broken water pistols and to invent fascinating little puzzles where you have to work out how to separate three-dimensional shapes like twisted nails or loops of stiff wire and then put them back together again. Franco is always light-hearted, merrily crouching with his arms round Michele and Stefi, his too-young, clean-shaven face inanely bright as he explains what they have to do.

Zia Maria, rotund, jolly, always brightly dressed, always made up, is most notable for her extraordinary knowledge of those sporting events in which Italy has taken part with merit. She knows all the players in the national football side. And all the reserves. She follows both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia. She knows the name of every Olympic gold medalist. And if the Italians began to shine at tiddlywinks, she would know the names of all the protagonists, in both the men’s and women’s teams, and who had a bruised thumbnail and who had been banned for using weighted winks or sniffing cocaine before a game. Zia Maria is a darling and the children love her. ‘Just a short visit,’ she explains, as most days, ‘to see if you need something.’ They offer to do my shopping for me. When I decline, I can see they’re unhappy about it. They’re part of that vast army of Italians who found themselves with nothing to do far too soon and rejoiced, but then are always trying to eat into other people’s space. If one could adopt grandchildren, they would.

Having finally shaken everybody off — the sacredness of twelve-thirty makes it easier — I lay a table on a patch of cut grass behind the prison house under a grubby sunshade Nonna once proudly told me she recovered from rubbish in the street. And at last — the metal puzzles confiscated until afterwards — we sit down to our mozzarella and tomatoes and salad and bread. And wine.

But not without interruptions.

I am just trying to explain why Nonno’s kiwi plants (to our left) will never bear any kiwis if he doesn’t tend and prune them, and then, even more difficult, to explain why people like Nonno are always starting things but never finishing them (for I should have remarked that a row of vines was once planted, too, and that a half of one wall of the prison house is stuccoed, and about ten yards of the main path is paved, and in the corner there’s a shed under construction as of a decade ago that has posts and a roof but no walls) — yes, I’m just trying to reduce a vast psychological territory to something that will give the impression of sense to two infants at different stages of development, when an urgent clucking and flapping explodes inside the prison house, detonated apparently by a unison shout from Clara and Iolanda, the decaying spinsters.

Two fat brown hens come racing out of the house and rush off into an undergrowth of kiwis, vines, geraniums, bougainvillea, weeds of every variety. For when I said that the fence dividing the savannah in half was inexplicable, I meant that it was so in this: that it was never sufficiently finished to restrict Nonno’s hens to one side or the other. These two animals thus have free rein of the whole property, and, not to put too fine a point on it, they shit all over the place. Iolanda comes out to tell me I must remember to keep the outside door to the prison house closed, otherwise those beastly hens go and do it right up the stairs. ‘And it’s illegal, Signor Tim,’ she reminds me. ‘It’s illegal to keep chickens in an urban area.’ As if my knowing this or even Nonno’s knowing this, which he obviously does, could make any difference at all when Nonna is determined not only to have her hens and her fresh eggs every day, but to allow them to roam where they will. Then the truth is that Nonno actually takes pleasure in his tenants’ outrage. ‘With what they’re paying,’ he says, ‘if they don’t like it they can go.’ He dreams of getting rid of all his ancient tenants and miraculously redeveloping the place, something that would no doubt be started but never finished. Yet whenever one of the old folk is ill, which is often, he is always ready to drive them to hospital, and when Antonietta’s husband died and there was no grave for him, Nonno allowed the man to prolong his tenancy in the Baldassarre family grave in the cemetery on the hill. When I took the children up there one day to see the place, I was not surprised to find that Great Grandfather Rocco’s tomb was still without a proper headstone.

Iolanda retreats to let us eat in peace. Stefi stands up and despite all my protests picks up one of the hens and starts to stroke and soothe it as if it had been mistreated, while Michele vociferously repeats what he has heard Nonna complain of sometimes, that when she’s away for a few days, Antonietta steals all the eggs that are meant for us. Stefi demands that we buy some chickens ourselves and keep them in Via delle Primule. It is wonderful how it doesn’t occur to children that people who install remote control gates and sprinkler systems and who are capable of spending hours discussing the exact curve of a flower bed and the varieties of shrubs to put in it would not look kindly on the arrival of a couple of grubbing, dirtying chickens. The two Italys have to be kept far apart.

When I say no, Stefi bursts into tears, hugging the chicken so hard it dashes off in fright.

Michele tells me how cruel I am.

Shamefully, I solve the situation by telling them they can have one of Antonietta’s chewing gums.

Lunch over, there’s the brief farce of attempting, under instructions from Rita, to get the children to have a siesta. For while it is true that in summer, and above all on holiday, most Italians like to have a siesta, it is equally true that children the world over do not.

We lie in the room we’re all sharing, roll down old wooden slat shutters (museum pieces) and start to chat. Now, what was the thing you enjoyed most this morning, children? They’re kicking each other across their beds. Stefi whines as soon as the game doesn’t go her way…

Let’s play the rhyming game, I suggest. You choose a word and then have to think of all the possible rhymes. Chewing his ciunga , Michele immediately begins to think of words that will rhyme with the naughty words he knows: razzo (rocket), because then in a few moments he will feel legitimised in proudly announcing cazzo (prick), upon which Stefi will go into paroxysms of laughter. Or mulo (mule) so that he can then pull out culo (arse).