Tim Parks: An Italian Education

Quello che tu vedi non è il mare

Ma il mio amore per te, Amalia!

What you see isn’t the sea

But my love for you, Amalia!

Stefi is impressed by this declaration, corresponding as it does to the tone of so many children’s stories and her infant preoccupation with princes and princesses (curiously, the Italian expression for ‘prince charming’ is principe azzurro — a sportsman? Hardly Roberto Baggio, one feels). Stefi repeats the words il mio amore per te ; she savours them like sweets, like still-fresh ciunga . But she doesn’t seem to connect them in any way with what the adolescents are up to, crawling up over the rocks and each other. Perhaps she’s right. What always surprises me, though, is how Italians will go off to pet and canoodle in groups, large groups, occasionally breaking off and shouting jokes to each other. They have none of the trepidation and secrecy that seemed such an inevitable part of the package in my adolescence.

Then Stefi is spelling out something else, the name of another fishing boat rolling through the harbour mouth. At last it seems someone has decided to do without a saint’s protection. With all the brashness of the modern, this sleek and powerful boat is simply called, ‘ Tempo è denaro ’. Time is Money.

Michele and his old men have caught nothing. Despite all their expensive equipment, the men don’t seem to be concentrating very hard on the sport in hand. The conversation is all jokes about how badly the azzurri are playing, how shameful it was when they lost to Ireland, when they didn’t beat Mexico, how the boys are spoilt and overpaid and fragile. The afternoon slips by. The azure deepens, evening approaches. Nothing is caught. Until finally somebody new arrives to show everybody how it’s done.

He’s a surprisingly city-dressed fellow with carefully groomed white whiskers, gold watch and chic blue-framed sunglasses. He parks his scooter by the beacon, takes his shoulder bag and walks to a pole-and-derrick affair I hadn’t noticed before at the very point of the jetty, between the rocks to one side and the harbour entrance to the other. From his bag he pulls out a big net about two metres in diameter, which he rigs up to the pole. That takes about two minutes. Down goes the net with the aid of a pulley system. The time to smoke a cigarette drawn from an elegant silver case, then he hauls up, non chalantly. Three sparkling fish! Out with them, wham them over the head with a short stick, away in a plastic bag…

‘Papa! Papa!’ Michele comes scrambling over the rocks at great risk to life and limb. ‘Papà, he’s caught some fish!’

This is exciting. The rods are forgotten. The new arrival smokes his cigarettes, tosses the stubs in the water, raises and lowers his net. The next three casts are in vain. The little crowd that had formed begins to disperse. But at the next attempt out leaps a truly grand fish, perhaps sixty or seventy writhing, wriggling centimetres of silver scales and colour.

‘Porco Giuda!’ Michele breathes in admiration, and I haven’t the heart to correct him. I’m impressed myself. A fearful bash with his stick and the man takes the thing to a little door in the base of the beacon on whose cracking grey paint, it seems, he marks out the size of the biggest fish he catches. This one is just marginally smaller than some fading marks of a while ago. There are cries of awe from the adolescents who have broken off their petting to watch. The older fishermen who just haven’t been trying hard enough gaze stonily out to sea.

It’s another concession. The city man pays a tiny rent for the right to haul up these fish. Doubtless his father had the licence before him. Nobody else is allowed to rig up their net to this pole, though I bet they do sometimes.

Cycling back, that fish grows bigger and bigger in Michele’s mind, the man’s skill greater and greater. The way he grabbed the thing from the net! In both hands. How big and powerful it was! How it fought and jumped! By the time we’ve finished our ritual ice-cream at a bathing station with a stunning red-and-yellow awning that turns our faces burnished gold, the fish is about as long as Michele’s arms will spread. My attempts to explain the difference between the sport and skill of the old men and their rods as compared to this leisurely massacre of nets and sticks, fall on stony ground, or rather, sinks into deep, deep water. After all, the old men caught nothing (I feel they let me down somehow; they could have given my son a better education).

‘There’s nothing wrong with nets,’ Michele insists, ‘the fishing boats use nets.’ ‘Yes, but at least they risk their lives,’ I say, ‘going out to sea all night.’ I explain the words on the monument. Maria, piscoriae tuere filios . ‘They go way out to sea, and if there’s a storm maybe they don’t come back.’ Michele is decidedly unimpressed. As with our experience at I Laghetti, it’s the sure catch he dreams of, the certainty of success. Like those thousands of Italian hunters who shoot at pheasants released ten minutes earlier from a farm. Or the old hands at the gravel pits, using forbidden spinners. Or the football experts who rejoice when the other team’s star is injured and absent. No Tom Sawyer, Michele sees little virtue in doing things the hard way…

What are you up to now?’ We’re almost back at the Medusa when we run into Zia Paola and her daughter taking a walk. Still living at home, Fulvia is one of those Italian girls whose boyfriends have been saving up to marry for a decade and more. She is thirty-two, but, arm in arm with her mother, looks twenty-five. The radio will tell you that nearly forty percent of Italian thirty-year-olds still live with their parents.

‘A last swim,’ I explain. I have the bag and the swimming stuff strapped to the back of the bike.

‘You really shouldn’t,’ she says, kind and worried. And adds, ‘Troppa umidità.’

Too much humidity? To go swimming! Here is one of those wonderful moments where I simply don’t understand, while the children do. It’s not that I can’t grasp the meaning of the words. Nobody could speak more clearly than Zia Paola. It’s their applicability that eludes me. How can it be too humid to swim? I don’t know. I smile and wish mother and daughter a pleasant passeggiata .

Walking down to our sunshade, Stefi explains. ‘She means the air is so damp we will catch cold when we come out of the water.’

I hadn’t noticed, but the late afternoon, early evening, is not so blue as it was. Six-thirty. The slanting sun has found a grey haze in the sky, the breeze has dropped, the air is indeed slightly moist, limp. But the temperature is definitely still up in the thirties…

Is this obsession with imagined hazards just a way of showing love?

From her inevitably supine position at the sunshade two rows behind ours, the jukebox mother is telling her boy and somebody else’s child that they can’t go in the water because they ate so late. She speaks with her eyes closed but the voice is firm. She told them not to eat late, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They kept playing. Well, now they can’t go in the water. They would drown.

How late did they eat, I wonder. And how much? And why are they still at the beach if they can’t go in the sea? The older child runs around whooping and kicking sand over everybody. The mother ignores him, adjusting a silk scarf drawn tight round her thighs. He is perfectly free to misbehave, but not to risk his health.

Then I notice that my own children are speaking to each other in much the same way. Stefi says, ‘Michele, you’ll have to take your towel down near the water so you can put it round your shoulders as soon as you get out.’ ‘Don’t forget your flip-flops, Stefi,’ Michele replies, ‘or you’ll hurt your little feet on the shells.’ It’s asphyxiating. And so endearing.