Tim Parks: An Italian Education

The beachgoers are gathering their magazines and tanning oils and departing, fussing with their clutter of towels and spades and the inflatable toys they can’t bring themselves to deflate, otherwise they’d have to blow them up again tomorrow. The Medusa’s cleaning team are setting out, closing and tying the sunshades in case there’s a late-night storm, starting up their sieving machine to pick up the cigarette stubs and ring pulls.

We set off. Despite the damp, the children insist on their cold showers. I chicken out. I’m not that crazy. While I wait for them, I read a notice by the cabins headed Capitaneria di porto (Port Authority). Every bathing station is obliged to have one. Poster-size but written in print fit for a paperback, it gives an impressive list of rules expressed in exquisitely legal language regarding the duties of bathing stations, the lifeguard service, boating rights, bathing rights, fishing rights, first-aid equipment, safety measures, etc. I’m just checking that the bagnino was indeed in flagrant disobedience of these rules when the PA comes on. The piccola bambina Marcia Maroni has got lost. Has anybody seen the piccola bambina Marcia Maroni, and if so could they please take her at once to her parents, who are anxiously waiting at the office of the Medusa bathing station.

A little child is missing! The awful thought comes to me that someone may indeed be drowning while our bagnino is still canoodling. And I feel he just doesn’t deserve that. It’s not fair. I’m anxious for him. Then the message repeats. La piccola bambina, Marcia Maroni, di quattordici anni … The little girl, Marcia Maroni, fourteen years old… I smile with relief. How flexible that word bambina is! More likely Marcia is the bagnino ’s girl rather than somebody he is supposed to be saving.

The kids come chasing out of the shower, and the first thing Stefi does is run to the path to look down between the sunshades to the sea. Yes, the moscone is still there, she cries. They giggle. But now I notice something else, too. On the pole beside the bagnino ’s chair the red flag is up, to announce, according to the rules of the Capitaneria di porto, a potential bathing hazard. The smart blond boy has covered his ass. So to speak.

Cycling back from the sea, seven-thirtyish, Michele notices the name of the street for the first time: Via Luigi Cadorna; while I observe that someone has come along and painted white circles round the drains. At last they’re going to lift the damn things so that they don’t lie a treacherous foot below the present level of the tarmac.

‘Who was Luigi Cadorna?’

Stefi is cycling round and round one of the painted drains in her little blue dress.

‘Luigi Cadorna was a maresciallo , commander in chief of the Italian army in the First War.’

Michele wants to know more.

So I have to tell him that Luigi Cadorna was held responsible for Italy’s greatest and most costly defeat of the war, Caporetto. It was such a disaster that the name Caporetto has become synonymous with cataclysmic defeat. And when some corrupt politician is voted out of power, or some opera singer is booed out of La Scala, the newspapers will invariably say, that was so and so’s Caporetto, that was the end for him.

‘Why,’ Michele asks innocently, ‘did they name a street after this man, if he was responsible for such a defeat?’

This is an excellent question, though looking at what kind of street Via Luigi Cadorna is — the broken paving, the abandoned railway line, the litter, the sunken drains, the often overpowering smell of cats — one can perhaps understand. Instead I tell him that Nonno agrees entirely, with Michele’s perplexity that is. Indeed, Nonno has twice written to the town council asking for the name to be changed, objecting to having to live on a street named after someone who was not only incompetent, which is to be expected (my father-in-law does not have a high opinion of the men he fought under in the Second War), but who is widely perceived to have been so , which is far worse.

But I’m overdoing it here. Michele can’t understand what I’m talking about.

Look, I tell him. Lots of people think the Italian football trainer Arrigo Sacchi is incompetent, non bravo . If Italy win, they won’t say so. They’ll say he’s bravo . But if Italy lose, especially if they lose tonight against a team like Nigeria, then everybody is always and forever going to say he is incompetent, even if he wasn’t.

How almost fateful those words were!

And how speaking of the devil can conjure him up! Not Luigi Cadorna, fortunately, nor Arrigo Sacchi, but Nonno. For when we return we find him sitting under a battered sunshade on the edge of the savannah reading a letter. Nonna is in the deep grass making little jumps at the fig trees. As always their appearance is unannounced and unexpected. They weren’t able, they had said, to be back during our holiday.

There are the usual extravagant embraces, expressions of undying affection, of admiration at how wonderful everyone looks, and it occurs to me that, as with the strict routine of almost every aspect of Italian life (and this holiday has been no exception), so this predictable and required theatricality is another way of helping people to live well. Never is it easier to be oneself and relaxed about it than when you know exactly what is expected of you. There is so little that has to be decided here, either in what you do or how you do it: you take the kids to the beach early to get the healthiest of the day, you shout at them and smother them in affection, you have your pizzetta and aperitivo at 11.30, the shadows move in precise ellipses round the sunshades, you embrace your mother-in-law warmly.

‘Oh, Tim,’ she lies. ‘You’re my favourite son.’

Leaving me with a bowl of fresh figs, Nonna takes the kids off through the deep grass to find where the chickens have laid their eggs. She wears a battered straw hat, a wide skirt, a T-shirt. At seventy, there is still something girlish, certainly capricious, about her. The way she walks you’d say she romps. The children romp after her. ‘Nonnina, Nonnina!’ they cry. She turns and caresses them again and hugs them and ruffles their hair and pinches their golden skin and says how much she’d like to eat them alive — her nonna always used to say that, I’ll eat you alive — and how sorry she is they couldn’t be here during our holiday, but they had to look after — surprise, surprise — a sick relative. Now where has that silly pìopìo laid its eggs. Silly chick chocks. Her nonna always said chickens could be intelligent, but never when it came to laying their eggs. Where can they have put them? Antonietta, I notice, has retired to the crack between her shutters.

I go and sit with Nonno. He wears khaki shorts and shirt, revealing his fat, freckled legs, his fat, freckled chest. The buttons are straining. A hat, even more battered than his wife’s, is tipped back on a round, freckled forehead. He pours liberally from a supermarket carton of table wine, lights a Camel Light. I realise he is upset about something.

What?

‘Children. Oh, children, caro mio ,’ he says. ‘What else.’ He tips back his hat even further. ‘You’re crazy having another,’ he says frankly. ‘Crazy.’ He shakes his head.

I point out that he had three.

The rotation of the headshake increases and seems all the more impressive since the man has no neck. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t crazy.’

I wait. The fact is that Nonno loves mysteries. He loves setting you up, then not telling you things. Retaining an area of independent operation is an important principle for the Italian male. Nobody, for example, has ever known the extent of my father-in-law’s income or bank balance. No one ever knows where he goes when he goes on a trip. It’s not unlike the question of Lucia’s virginity.