Tim Parks: An Italian Education

In bed, before her goodnight kiss, Stefi says, ‘You promised.’

‘Promised what?’

‘Yes, you did promise,’ Michele tells me more seriously. He’s radiant, of course. Italy won. But Stefi is averting her face. Then I remember. Tomorrow, June 24th, is San Giovanni Battista, not quite the summer solstice but nearly, and Zia Paola has explained to the children that there’s a tradition that on this, the shortest night of the year, one gets up before the dawn to go down to the beach to see the sun rise over the Adriatic. And though it must be controindicato , for the air is so humid, some people actually take a swim as well. So Paola told them. Apparently, in some state of semiconsciousness, I have promised.

‘Well, if you had gone to bed in decent time…’

Can’t you just hear your own father’s voice sometimes, when you start explaining why a promised treat is impossible? That tone of inexorable reason.

‘It’s so late now, it’s past midnight…’

‘Per favore, Papà!’

‘No!’

Nonno, standing at the door, says, ‘I’ll take them. I never sleep much.’

Then you feel jealous that someone else is going to give your children such an experience, and you cave in. ‘Okay…’

‘O Papà!’

The arms now reach up to grab me round the neck. The red lips are going to kiss me on the mouth. I shall have to tell her to be a little less obvious about this kind of behaviour. Two weeks at the beach may have been too much.

So here’s a real honest to goodness sacrificio , a project worthy of my mother’s kind of holiday… To see the sun rise over the Adriatic in midsummer, you have to get up at about four o’clock. On this particular night that means less than four hours’ sleep. If only it was sleep… For even when the honking has died down, and the occasional firecracker, and the shouts of youths on Luigi Cadorna, even then the hot night is full of cats moaning and howling and generally giving the impression that love is some sort of infernal punishment. Not a new idea. Nonna’s nonna apparently used to say that the way to discourage lovemaking cats was to pour a bucket of water over them, and this I once managed to do, back in Verona. It worked well enough, too; only afterwards I felt somewhat mean. So tonight I just get out of bed and walk barefoot into the savannah to shoo them off, remembering again, as I do so, the lovingly anchored catamaran and Michele and Stefi calling help. Coming back into the house, there is a huge frog sitting in moonlight on the doormat. He looks as though he’s waiting for something. As if he might turn into Roberto Baggio or something. Roberto bloody Baggio. Principe azzurro . I will never be Italian. I will never in my heart of hearts be able to support the Italian national football team. My boy idolises the sullen bugger. Good for him.

And now there’s a mosquito in the room. The whine of warm, warm nights. The stickiness of the sheets. But the sheets are your only defence. Then the rumble of a train in the distance, the clonking of the prostatic cripple upstairs crutch-bound for the bathroom, and always, in between, the treble whirr of the crickets, insistent, an acoustic pressure so constant you’re not aware of it until for the miracle of a few seconds it stops. Then starts again. I have no difficulty, as it turns out, being up and about before the dawn…

My father-in-law has a lovely way of announcing himself when he thinks he’s waking you, or surprising you. He appears at a window and says, ‘Whey! Whey, Tim! Whey, ragazzi !’ where ‘whey’ is as much a whistle as a word, somehow both soothing and urgent. He’s got his trilby on to protect his baldness and a light jacket. In his Old Dog shorts he flaunts an air of down-market safari.

Kids in their clothes then and off. They’re dead, of course. They barely know what’s happening. Outside, the savannah is flopping with frogs. I would never have imagined. Never seen one during the day. Nonno remarks that he made this trip several times when he was a kid. And he took Rita and the boys, too. People used to light bonfires then, up on the hill. Before there were any houses there. Before there were any bathing stations. Though he doesn’t know why. He can’t imagine what any of it’s got to do with Giovanni Battista. So often it’s difficult to know whether a celebration was instituted for a saint, or merely became associated with his day. In any event, the important thing is that even after the motive has been forgotten, the celebration goes on.

We walk down Luigi Cadorna, taking advantage of the white circles not to fall into the potholes. There’s a puddle round the crazy woman’s Seicento. Nonno is concerned that the buckets of water she tosses will cause mould on the stucco. Enjoying a few hours of relative cool, the husky dog sees fit to bark at us. Which finally wakes the children up.

‘ Porco Giuda! ’ Michele says, rubbing his eyes.

Enough, I tell him severely. Really, that’s enough. Say that again and I’ll, I’ll… I can’t think of anything.

‘You’re just jealous because Italia won,’ he tells me smugly. He always says Italia even when he’s speaking English.

I can already see myself refusing all future requests for loans.

Stefi then asks who Giovanni Battista was. He was the one, Michele announces, who said Jesus was God, only he wasn’t really. He wasn’t God.

Stefi, despite being glad to skip the ora di religione , protests that he was. Still relatively fresh from the scuola materna , and stories of Christ’s tears collected in phials and crucifixes that protect you from evil, Stefi is a determined believer. They begin a fierce, was — wasn’t argument relative to the deity of Christ.

‘He was not God. How could a man be God?’

At ten past four in the morning!

I interrupt to remark that Giovanni Battista had his head cut off.

‘Betrayed by a dancing woman,’ Nonno says, shaking an Old Dog head.

But the children lose interest now when a car roars down the seafront road flying a great tricolour from the window.

‘ Alè! Evviva! ’ Michele shouts. There’s the echo of another Alè! ‘Grande Italia!’ Michele shouts.

‘ Santa patata, Miccko ,’ I protest, ‘they only beat Nigeria two — one after extra time.’

‘ Capperi! ’ Nonno says, ‘What we need now is a cappuccino and a brioche.’

Capperi (capers) is a word I shall have to get used to using, a nice harmless expletive you can pull out in front of the children, but not as silly as Santa patata .

‘ Avanti popolo ,’ Stefi says when we get to the beach. ‘ Alla riscossa! ’ To arms! As if this were D-Day or something and us approaching from the sea.

We walk down through the Delfino Verde. It’s a bit nearer than the Medusa. Four-twenty a.m. Away from the street lights you realise the night is hardly dark at all: there’s a soft glow amongst the folded deck chairs, drooping sunshades; the sand is faintly luminous and uncannily cold when it sifts into your sandals. The children feel the awe of a familiar place at an unfamiliar time, they learn that the beach isn’t always la stessa spiaggia , or not at dawn; as sometimes there is ice on the hot road, fog on the sunny coast, a reverse side to everything. There’ll come the day when Roberto Baggio doesn’t score at the last minute, when whoever it is stops writing graffiti about Amalia.

Then we almost run into two people in their sleeping bags. The blonde, blonde hair of northerners. I shush the kids. Nonno remarks that he has more respect for these travellers than for his own boys, always off on luxury holidays at their father’s expense. Or back to Mamma to be served hand and foot. But I know he loves it when the boys come home.