Tim Parks: An Italian Education

I decide we will call our next child Lucia, since we know it will be a girl. If Rita agrees. Lucia is a lovely name. She’ll have her saint’s day when the presents get handed out…

When I have the patience not to ask any questions, but just to accept some wine and a cigarette, he finally says: ‘In my case though there were mitigating circumstances.’

What is all this about? His short trousers, I notice, round his huge girth, have a tag proclaiming the brand name: Old Dog.

‘In the sense,’ he reflects, ‘that mine was the first generation this happened to.’

What happened? But I don’t ask.

From across the savannah come excited cries in the evening air. They have recovered an egg. An egg! O bravo pìopìo!

I remark that the neighbours have been complaining about the hens shitting on the stairs. That cheers the old man up. We laugh together. Another cause for optimism, I tell him, is that they’ve been painting white circles round the drains on Luigi Cadorna. They must be going to fix them up. His laugh turns to derision. ‘No, caro mio , what it means is there is a bike race passing through the street. The riders have to be warned about the drains, since if they hit them that would be the end of their race. So they paint circles round them, but they don’t fix them.’

‘Ah. Perhaps the mad woman will throw a bucket of water over the cyclists.’

Again he laughs, but is not to be brought out of his depression. Not even when I peel a fig and split open its pulpy redness for him. After another silence, scratching lightly, he says the point is that these days, not only do you have to support your kids in their infancy, but throughout their lives as well. Ecco il problema , throughout their lives to the bitter end. In the modern world there is never a moment, never a situation, when you’re not responsible for your kids, when you don’t have to satisfy their enormous appetites. He stubs out his cigarette. Since that wasn’t true for him when he was a child, he can be forgiven for not foreseeing the way the world was going. Whereas I should have been wise to the thing.

He begins to list, though clearly this is still not the nub of the problem, all the sacrifici he has made for his children: taking them round the world with him on his international assignments, always giving them vitamins and iron and whatever was supposed to make them healthy, always paying for the best medical treatment money could buy, always finding the best schools, supporting them through their university education, paying the rent on their flats, paying while they were unemployed, paying while they were employed but not properly paid (as so often happens in Italy), even paying off their debts, contracted without his knowledge…

The list goes on and on, with a mixture of genuine complaint and resigned humour. And is it over? Is it over? No it is not over!

So here we are at last. I wait a little more, and finally he has to tell me. When he returned home, he found two letters waiting for him. He pulls them out of the top pocket of his shirt. He doesn’t know which has made him more depressed. ‘You want to write about Italian children?’ he says. ‘So read.’

They are letters from the twins, Rita’s younger brothers, the children’s beloved uncles, with whom I am on excellent terms. The first is from Renato in Rome. Typed, it expresses itself in somewhat bald terms, which are listed one by one, like the research projects in Michele’s school, like the little boy’s essay on fishing.

Point one: Nonno’s property, if sold for development, would be worth a fortune. Point two: this property belongs to the whole family, not just to Nonno, for the whole family had to make sacrifici in order for Nonno not to sell when times were hard (here Renato remembers, apocryphally, Nonno insists, a time when they had to use newspaper to wipe their bottoms). Point three: it is ridiculous that the children should have to wait till Nonno’s death to enjoy their inheritance. Taxes would wipe out a great deal of the money and they would be too old to enjoy it. Point four: given all of the above, it is Nonno’s duty to his children to sell now . (‘Duty’ and ‘now’ are underlined.) Point five: with some of the money he can buy himself an appartamentino , quite big enough for himself and Nonna.

Nonno is shaking his head.

‘A veritable Caporetto,’ I remark, since I have this on my mind.

‘No, two,’ he says. ‘Two!’

As if after Waterloo there were anything left for another Waterloo!

The other letter is from the twin in Verona, Roberto. He is about to marry and hence needs to buy a house. The fidanzata ’s parents have offered a sum of money, but only on the condition that his parents make an equal contribution. Since this is a major moment in his life, he feels he has a right to expect that Nonno do his duty and…

They don’t grow up, the old man protests. They hang on to Papà and Mamma forever. They don’t even want to be independent. Half of them are still at home at forty. Still being served hand and foot. They think they’re owed everything. They see other parents buying their children houses, so they think I should too. I’m supposed to bleed myself dry for their pleasure. I’m supposed to move out of my own house for their satisfaction. He makes a graphic gesture of one opening his wallet and just emptying the contents all over the ash path.

‘ Tieni famiglia ,’ I tell him.

He grunts.

I suggest their behaviour, albeit selfish, is only human. It’s true that most parents are buying apartments for their children. It’s true of at least half the couples up our street. Not to mention the fact that everybody seems to speak obsessively of duty in this country…

Nonno splutters, pours more wine, lights another cigarette, then, in a manner I like so much in him, he suddenly relaxes. He sits back on his chair, lifts his feet to another chair pushed against the bougainvillea, crosses his chubby legs, tips his hat forward over his baldness, grunts, laughs.

‘What are you going to do?’

He reaches forward, still from his reclining position, takes the letters and very deliberately tears them up, replacing them in neat piles on the table.

‘ Niente ,’ he says. ‘Nothing. I forget they wrote, they’ll forget they’ve written.’

If only Luigi Cadorna could have done the same after Caporetto.

Then staring right in my eye from his own twinkling blue, he announces, as if it were the world’s greatest truth, ‘ Gli schiaffi dei figli sono carezze per i genitori .’ It’s the ultimate statement of the sacrifici principle: ‘A child’s blows are caresses for the parents.’ After a silence of about ten seconds we both burst out laughing.

Nonna returns with two eggs and a tirade against Antonietta, whom I just saw her embracing warmly. The children fire their water pistols at columns of ants climbing the cracked stucco, at lizards soaking up the very last eight o’clock sunrays. Then it’s dinner outside: ham and figs and boiled eggs and salad. But even after such a long day, even with the prospect of Italy — Nigeria at ten o’clock, the children are still not satisfied. So Stefi begins a seduction job on Nonno. She sits next to the old man and strokes his hand as he breaks open a panino . She snuggles up to him. He asks for a kiss, but she doesn’t give it to him. Our holiday has doubtless heightened her sense of the value of her kisses. I’ve noticed she’s been withholding them from me. Or rather, she’s been dosing them out. She’s applying the ricatti principle and knows she can do it more effectively than her older brother, who just bounces about and demands things. Perhaps this is the difference between Rita’s relationship with her parents and that of the twins…