Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The room is simple. Whitewash and stone tiles. From the wall above me, as Michele swears and Stefi giggles, a heart shaped canvas of the Virgin (but would she ever have got her certificate?) looks on with motherly patience. She’s heard all this and worse. And when, some time in the middle of the holiday, discussing the baby Mummy is going to have, I find I have chosen one of these siesta times to sketch out the facts of life, Our Good Lady doesn’t attempt to contradict me, as perhaps she might. I give the children the gist, relieved as all parents no doubt are to have found the moment and got it over with. ‘So that’s how it is,’ I tell them. Michele is un impressed. He half smiles. Am I taking them for a ride? Not one of your better stories, Stefi says, and then informs me that when her friend Francesca had a little baby sister it was because their parents bought it for her. This is the euphemism parents use in Italy. ‘We’ve decided to buy you un bel bambino .’

‘Look, you can’t buy a child,’ I have to tell her. ‘Who would you buy it from? Somebody has to make it.’ But Michele is quick to remind me that Stefano and Marta and Beppe have all gone to Brazil this summer, precisely with a purchase in mind. Beppe told him they were paying ten thousand dollars to be able to bring back a child…

Well, okay, I decide to leave it at that. The general idea has been fielded anyway. With time things will no doubt fall into place. The kids are laughing and kicking each other, while I’m getting pretty drowsy after all the wine I’ve drunk. In a last desperate attempt to keep them on their beds, I suggest the association game. Who’s going to start?

‘Spiaggia,’ Michele says.

‘Ombrellone,’ I reply.

‘Bello,’ Stefi says.

‘No Stefi you can’t use adjectives.’

‘Bagnino…’

‘Ragazza…’

‘Stupida…’

‘Stefi, I said you can’t use adjectives. You have to use words that are things.’

Stefi thinks. ‘What was the word?’

‘La ragazza del bagnino,’ Michele repeats.

‘Bambino,’ Stefi announces.

Perhaps something has sunk in after all…

‘Mamma,’ Michele picks up, predictably enough.

‘Buona,’ Stefi goes on. Another adjective. But this time I don’t intervene. Very vaguely I hear their voices calling Papà! Papà! Your turn! Come on, Papà! and I know that I’m falling asleep, and that I’m damned, begging the Virgin’s pardon, if I’m going to wake up for this silly game…

In a daze of sun and wine my siesta is a vivid dream of their games, for they get up and sneak off as soon as they realise I am asleep. I fight off a gale of shouts and screams to stay under. Vaguely, I’m aware they’ve found someone to play with. Samuele, the cripple’s grandson. The screams seem to revolve round and round the house. It’s as if one were sleeping by the hub of a funfair carousel. Something rattles on the shutters, a squirt from their giant machine-gun water pistol, the Liquidator. And another thing troubling my dreams is a vague sense of guilt, of impropriety. I really shouldn’t be letting them swear so much. Michele and Samuele are yelling ‘Porco Giuda’ (Pig Judah) about every five seconds, interspersed with ‘Dio Cristo’ and even, unless I only dreamed it, ‘ Porco Dio’ , the worst. Is it the Madonna trying to wake me up to deal with this, to save the old spinsters’ ears?

I sleep on, and when I finally wake towards four it may be because of the sudden silence. There’s no one around. Ranging out on the savannah to find where the children have got to, disturbing lizards on the path, watching the columns of ants at work on the plum trees, I eventually hear voices from Antonietta’s house. In the end the television proved her winning card. They’re sitting there in another room full of Sacred Hearts and Pietàs watching a daily summer programme where stunningly undressed compères visit every beach up and down the Adriatic to get fifteen-year-olds to karaoke on a stage set right where the sea laps. Antonietta has tears in her eyes because Michele has been telling her how they visited her husband’s grave. How gentile of me to take them! What a good husband I am! How wonderful that Rita is having another baby!

Antonietta’s blouse is unbuttoned down past her bra. It’s suffocatingly hot in the Swiss chalet, though the children don’t seem to have noticed. Yes, she hurt her leg when she fell out of bed in the spring, but Signor Adelmo was so kind taking her to hospital. She fans herself with a magazine whose cover purports to reveal the third secret of Fatima. Meanwhile, the nymphette on the television is launching almost naked into ‘Sei un mito’. She’s a full semitone off the backing. And a further semitone away from Stefi’s rendering. When Antonietta opens the fridge to get me a beer, I see her egg rack is full. She knows where those chickens go. The old woman pulls out a bottle of beer whose label invites me to participate in Italy’s amazing World Cup adventure. How, it’s not clear. Trembling, her mottled knuckles knock the bottleneck against a glass. ‘Sit down.’ I decide I can perhaps face about half an hour of this, maybe spotting all the bizarre juxtapositions I can and observing the way they never seem to grate against each other.

Another old song they always play on the radio in summertime is, ‘Il treno dei desideri’, or, as some people know it, ‘Azzurro’. Azzurro is the colour of all Italian national sports teams who are always known as Gli azzurri , the blues. Hence, perhaps, the interest of my beer, Nastro azzuro, Blue Riband, in the World Cup. But most of all azzurro is the colour of every summer afternoon in this part of the world, a deep, deep azure. The first line of the song goes: ‘ Azzurro, il pomeriggio è troppo azzurro e lungo per me …’ — Blue, the afternoon is too long and blue for me… (‘blue’, it should be noted, has no negative connotations of the depressing variety clouding the colour of that sky).

It’s a love song, naturally enough. How can the singer ever get through such a long blue afternoon without his beloved? Well, with the huge income from the immensely successful disc one suspects. But that’s as may be. The song is good because it captures, in exactly the right gently crooned cadences, something every Italian must feel from earliest childhood: just how long, how languid, these afternoons are, and the instinctive way you know that one could never do anything more than mark time on such afternoons as this. They are certainly not made for work, and perhaps not even for love. More for respite from the one, dreams of the other, listening to languid songs…

Having escaped from Antonietta, we stretch out the long blue afternoon with a dream of a bike ride. We pedal down to the promenade and then along the seafront, either north to Montesilvano or south towards central Pescara and the port. Northwards, the bathing stations soon lose their lushness, their great awnings and tree-shaded terraces, their leisurely confusion of inside and out. Up here, as the town turns to stony hillside and the beach without breakwaters shrinks to a sliver, the concessions are more like frontier outposts, unhappy settlements on the edge of a luckier world, cracked imitations: a small bar, a few plastic seats that have seen better days, sunshades of the smaller, sadder, threadbare variety (that Nonna might collect for the savannah in Via Cadorna). A swing here is just a tyre hanging from two ropes. A roundabout is old tubular metal chairs bracketed to a big round wooden board. In short, out of town the front begins to take on that sort of weary, resigned, under-all-weathers look that so many British beaches have, though without, it must be said, the touching pretensions to gentility.