Tim Parks: An Italian Education

How does an Italian become Italian? Or an Englishman English, for that matter? Are foreigners born, or made? In An Italian Education Tim Parks focuses on his own young children in the small village near Verona where he lives, building a fascinating picture of the contemporary Italian family at school, at home, at work and at play. The result is a delight: at once a family book and a travel book, not quite enamoured with either children or Italy, but always affectionate, always amused and always amusing.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and John Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Italian Neighbours and A Season with Verona .

My editor is concerned that I may have used too many Italian words in this book. I am concerned myself. Rereading now, I see there are one or two, or sometimes three on every page. Even the chapter headings are in Italian. Clearly I should say something in my defence.

My first idea was that I might offer a little glossary. But this would be no solution. For if each of the words could be explained with a simple alternative in English, then I would never have felt inclined to leave them in Italian in the first place. I have been a translator for many years and one of the most galling aspects of that galling job is to realise, on translating a word, that you have offered only a tiny fraction of its meaning, only an empty semantic shell, since so often surface meaning is nothing more than the stony outcrop of a great mass of cultural bedrock beneath. Thus, if I write ‘ sacrifici ’ in Italian, you will immediately guess that it means ‘sacrifices’, but unless you have lived in Italy you cannot imagine how often and in how many ways that word is used here, how it seals a crucial joint in the Latin mind frame, offers a vital stepping stone in the Catholic search for good conscience.

Our experience of another country is also an experience of its language, how similar it is to our own, how different. It once occurred to me that one way to talk about Italy would be simply to make a list of all those Italian words that are untranslatable, or whose translation tells you next to nothing, and then give dozens of anecdotes showing how they are used. I never got round to that. I’m not meticulous enough. But something of the project remains, in Italian Neighbours first, and now in this book dedicated to my children, my foreign children. For when my daughter exclaims ‘ O la Madonna! ’, or my son sticks out two fingers of each hand and whispers ‘ Facciamo le corna ’, it would seem superfluous to translate the first, while to write, ‘Let’s make horns’ for the second isn’t going to help anyone. This is language that has to be savoured, discovered, enjoyed. Dubbed movies are always disappointing.

Professionals in the publishing world have warned me that people don’t want to read any word they’ve never seen before, or deal with any concepts they’re not familiar with. I’m not convinced. I think when you’ve got the hang of expressions like facciamo le corna and tengo famiglia you’re going to have a lot of fun with them. Mutter them to yourselves every day at the appropriate moments and you are guaranteed to feel, if only slightly, Italian. Anyhow, for those willing to make this small sacrificio I promise not to leave you out in the cold, if only because not being in the cold but becoming part of a privileged group, a family, is precisely what any Italian education is all about.

‘Cocco! Cocco!’

It’s a loud harsh voice from far away. At a quarter to nine the morning air is already vibrant with heat and light. Everywhere a steady brightness lies like a pressure on brilliant colour.

‘Cocco! Cocco fresco!’ The voice is getting louder, and it’s recognisably a pedlar’s voice, theatrical and coercive, the hard double ‘c’ extravagantly emphasised, the final ‘o’ almost stretching to two syllables. A young voice pretending to be old and bold.

‘COC–CO-O!’ You can hear the banging of a bucket now, as if against a leg at every step. ‘Cocco fresco!’

It’s a geometric world we’re in. First and furthest away lies the sea, behaving well today, a flat, undifferentiated dazzle, barely wrinkling where it meets an almost white sand. Coming closer, there are twenty measured metres between the water and the first row of sunshades. Old folks walk briskly here, parallel with the shoreline, their sagging or angular profiles sharp against brilliance beyond as they take their tonic morning stroll down the never-ending beach.

The voice is growing more insistent as it approaches.

‘Cocco! Cocco fresco!’

The sea, the strip of sand, and then the sunshades: great green-and-orange umbrellas on this bathing station, tall and wide, each two and a half metres from the next, twenty-four in rows parallel to the sea, fourteen in rows perpendicular, with one space at the midpoint of each row in each direction to form a pathway from road to sea, a pathway across the beach (so that seen from above one imagines a bright sandy cross dividing a huge flag of colour). On the ground beneath the striped umbrellas, the sun, still low, though higher every minute, revolves slow pools of shadow around deck chairs and lounge beds, likewise green and orange. The sand is a rigidly patterned chiaroscuro where the early-morning bathers stretch their towels and unfold their newspapers, entirely ignoring the now imperative cry:

‘COCCO!’ Clank, clank clank. ‘COCCO FRESCO!’

A small child fussing in the sand with a spade says ‘Cocco!’ in the sort of baby voice that repeats everything it hears. ‘Cocco!’ He looks up from his spadework to where a lanky adolescent is now approaching through a blaze of light, a bucket clanking under each arm.

Bending to adjust the baby’s sunhat, a woman’s soft voice says, ‘Yes, cocco della mamma! ’ Which is to say, ‘Mummy’s little darling, Mummy’s cuddly little man.’ But in perfect baby imitation of the young pedlar, now no more than a couple of metres away, the child shouts: ‘No, Cocco! ’ Then, ‘ Cocco fwecco! ’ As if he understood.

The mother laughs, twists on her deck chair and signals to the boy, who comes over with a grin. He is tall and straight with Latin-black hair and a smooth, bare, rather shrimpy chest already tanned to dark toast in early June.

‘How much?’ she asks.

He sets down his buckets on the sand and now we can see the slices of white coconut swimming in water.

‘A thousand lire.’

This is extortionate, but once again the child, rocking back and forth on his nappy and bright red shorts manages, ‘ Cocco fwecco! ’

‘Very clean,’ the pedlar knows to insist. He has a gold crucifix round his neck, three bracelets, an earring, a diver’s watch and a bright smile.

‘Va bene.’

The deal is done. The boy pushes a crumpled note into the pocket of denim shorts and resumes his pedlar’s cry among the sunshades. Meanwhile, the white coconut, whiter even than the light, dead white, is carefully washed from a bottle of still mineral water, then cut into tiny pieces so that a child can chew on it — my young child, Michele, gurgling in Adriatic light and heat, growing up Italian.