Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  We talked to our neighbours about it. The Visentini weren’t badly affected because they lived at the other side of the building and had installed elaborate double glazing. But the subject did allow for our first real contact with Vittorina. No sooner had we mentioned the dog than she was telling us how, when her husband had been dying the previous July, he had been unable to sleep because of the creature and she had begged Rocco Negretti to do something about it, to no avail. They were gentaccia, filth, no fate was bad enough for them. She burst into tears, remembering her husband’s suffering and we were able to offer her coffee in our flat, where she amazed us by remarking that she had never been in here before. No, she and Lucilla had been good friends with il professore, but the hateful Maria Rosa was a city woman and believed herself above them. They had never been invited into the flat. Il professore had always taken his coffee at Lucilla’s. While Maria Rosa did the shopping.

  Vittorina was in her late sixties, big boned, only slightly overweight. With great dark rings about her eyes, she was obviously morose by nature, a lover of candlelit churches, superstition, mystery and gossip. But when she laughed it was with sudden heartiness and enthusiasm, a sort of profound natural health. She would go and tell Lucilla, she said, what nice people we were, because her sister-in-law was mad not wanting us to use il professore’s parking place after il professore had treated her so badly.

  This was good progress, and terribly interesting of course (should we ask Vittorina about the photo taken near Prague), but it didn’t solve the problem of Vega.

  Until one Sunday we would wake at dawn to the celebratory crackle of gunfire. The hunting season had begun, the hunting season that litters the paths with spent cartridges and deposits as much lead on the national territory as all the Fiats, Alfa Romeos and Mercedes put together. And although we had never seen so much as a wild rabbit on our Montecchio walks, the surrounding hills echoed with sharp reports all morning. Uccellini, pigeons, purpose-bred pheasants were presumably tumbling from the sky. And Vega was quiet that night, having had some exercise at last.

  8

  Stile cimitero

  AUGUST IS A better month than July in the Veneto. The days are still scorchingly hot but, after a series of dramatic thunderstorms bringing hailstones as big as marbles and prompting radio and newspaper discussions as to whether farmers could ever have had all the crops they are claiming compensation for, the humidity finally fades like a bad dream; the days are drier and clearer and the welcome dusk comes that bit earlier.

  It’s a good time to take walks. The countryside assumes its dusty green long-suffering summer look: matt colours under sizzling light. The vines are thicker now, their shoots knotting swiftly across the system of wires between one row of posts and the next, completely shading the ground below. You can walk beneath them under a panoply of leaves through vineyard after vineyard up the valley toward the village of Mizzole, your hair brushing against berries that are just beginning to swell. In the scented green light a wealth of insect life goes about its business: you see extraordinary, bright yellow spiders spinning their threads fast from tendril to tendril. And through the still air and intense heat, you gradually become aware of a great silent seething all around, urgent and secretive, as if the whole world were concentrated on growth, growth, growth. One tends to fall silent oneself crossing vineyards on hot summer days. The plants don’t want to be disturbed. There is so much still to be done before September.

  On the plain to the south, the corn is already in and the contadini are burning the dusty stubble with a cavalier disregard for fire hazards. On the hill above us il conte (as most rich landowners seem to be known) loses an acre of woodland and there are whisperings of arson. Climbing a steep slope of stunted trees and scrub we find two men running around a large burnt area trying to stamp down flames every time they flare up: here, there, behind them, in front. The smoke has a pleasant smell and is thin and lazy in the shimmering air. The men’s task seems hopeless, but, no, they say, they don’t need help. We climb on and find the count’s huge house, mansion rather: an ochre stucco, austere façade with travertine sills and plinths. Looking through the ironwork of the old gate we count six expensive cars. Rita reflects that Mussolini’s round-up of iron for the war effort generally seems to have passed over the gates of the rich, while the contadini shelled out their saucepans. I feel we could do with another war effort to get rid of the thousands of kilometres of superfluous ironwork sprouting up in modern suburbia.

  The radio begins to speak of drought and, in this our first year in Montecchio, the regional government ordered us to stop watering our gardens. Weeks passed. The ban was not lifted. But there was little sign of deterioration in the swelling tomatoes, aubergines and peppers which flourished in every vegetable patch. For the fat vigile entrusted with the business of enforcing the regulation, the same who had come to see if I was living where I was living, was not to be seen beyond six in the evening, while watering began more or less with the arrival of fresh air around midnight: old men and women pushing their hoses quietly between thick clods, the more arrogant new arrivals leaving it to their timers to turn on sprinkler systems under the stars. One thing the Italian politician perceives in a way his ingenuous English counterpart does not, is that it is the enforcement of a law which is unpopular, not the law itself, which is patently a good thing and the right response to whatever problem it is supposed to be solving. Just as it is right for the Pope to insist on chastity, as long as one is left to do as one pleases. In the model anarchic society, to which Italy frequently approximates, there will be rules without end whose value will never be questioned. And under this excellent cover everybody will live as he sees fit.

  In the minty night air the water hissed. The aubergines plumped out with their dark mauve of secret flesh. Practised fingers tied up the pepper plants and fat salad tomatoes were left to ripen on stone windowsills. Growth was almost audible.

  So that at number 10, poor Vittorina was perhaps the only person in all Montecchio who, out of some misguided sense of guilt or civic duty, actually bothered to carry out her dishwater in buckets and chuck it over our vegetable patch. With the result that one would find strands of spaghetti draped over the radicchio rosso, or a few bones of baccalà in amongst the parsley.

  Giampaolo came out with a red colander, looked at the ground, frowned, went back in empty-handed.

  Every condominium is galvanised by a sort of magnetic field of attractions and repulsions. Nowhere could these be more strongly and urgently felt at Via Colombare 10 than in attitudes to the large square communal garden to one side of the house. The truth is that the modern Italian has problems with his garden. He is not at ease with it yet as the Englishman is. Behind him he has centuries of a peasant culture which ended, if it has ended, not a hundred years ago, but yesterday. For him the ground means crops, the vines, the towering corn plants, tobacco, fruit trees, tomatoes. Quite simply, he has this in his blood. And there are many who buy or build huge villas on the slopes just outside Montecchio, with a swimming pool on the terrace, gymnasium in the basement and the most ornamental iron fence imaginable all around, and can then think of nothing to do with the garden but turn it into a vast cabbage and spinach patch, producing more than they could ever hope to eat or even give away. Out of a sort of nostalgia one assumes, or inertia, or lack of imagination.

  On the other hand, there are those who feel ashamed of their peasant roots and see the garden as a means of expressing their arrival in the stylish world of office jobs, high tech and magazine-inspired domestic environments. In which case they attempt to reconstruct the traditional ornamental garden of the Italian aristocracy: dwarf cypresses, oleanders, religious statuettes and tiny stone paths, spiced up perhaps with a variety of exotic plants some garden centre is passing off as fashionable and which haven’t a hope of surviving the cold Veneto winter. Once everything is planted and growing, such people don’t play in their gardens as an English family might. They tend them, brush them and s
weep them like some never-to-be-used front room, the way other people are forever cleaning cars they never take out of their garages. Until, with the sombre smell of the cypresses and a curious stony stasis of upright trees and crisscross flagging, the status-symbol garden begins to look like a little cemetery without the graves (but waiting for those of its owners perhaps). And house after house along Via Colombare, garden after garden, decorous little cemeteries alternate with vigorous pea and cabbage patches as each capofamiglia declares his particular response to the profound change that has taken place, the loss of that old obviousness that the land was for food which you needed to survive.

  Vegetable garden, cemetery; chained dogs in the first, a Siamese cat perhaps in the second; nervous animals in uncertain patches of green marooned by the lava flow from the city as it solidifies day by day in streets and wrought-iron fences. The tall tall fences of Montecchio, la fortuna del fabbro, the blacksmith’s jackpot. Nowhere, nowhere does one find that happy, relaxed, cosy, ad hoc floweriness of the suburban English garden. It must be one of the only areas of domestic civilisation where the British win hands down.

  Lucilla and Vittorina were nostalgic for a peasant past. Understandably. They wanted those tomatoes and peperoni, lettuce and radicchio rosso too. But Lucilla was fat and lazy. And a little ashamed. She drew the line at vines, for example, and was famous for having torn down with her own hands an attractive filare that Vittorina’s husband had set up. What’s more, if there was a vegetable patch, it must be away from the road, secluded from the casual glance of passers-by. After all, the house itself was so stylish with its pretentious Californian eaves, graffiato finish, and big terrace balconies, gave such an impression of having arrived, it would be a crime to disabuse the passer-by with some humble salad crop.

  So a thin strip of land away from the road and immediately beneath the wall of Negretti’s house and terrace turned out to be the only place for productive cultivation. This annoyed Vittorina, who did the lion’s share of work in the garden and got some real sense of recreation from it. It annoyed her because the ground below Negretti’s three-storey windowless wall got no sunshine, little rain and was full of snails, indeed teeming with them. They bred in the unkept clutter and cracked cement of Negretti’s terrace and then slithered down three metres of damp brickwork in the night to stake out number 10’s lettuces and peas. So Vittorina would far rather have had a sunny patch over towards the road, to feel the sun warm on her back in the early morning as she tied up her tomatoes. She didn’t care about the impression this would give to the neighbours, as she didn’t care about being seen carrying out her dirty dishwater; she had none of Lucilla’s obsession with social status.

  But a difference of opinion between Vittorina and Lucilla was easily resolved. Lucilla stamped her small, fat high-heeled foot and, aside from a little dark muttering of a saint’s name here and the Virgin’s there, Vittorina inevitably succumbed. Along with her peasant’s attachment to salad and vegetables, she also had the peasant’s age-old submission, to master and bad weather. With her never perfectly plucked moustache and fierce temper, Lucilla resembled both.

  No, the real problem with the garden in Via Colombare was that of integrating the old ladies’ earthy mix of nostalgia and shame with the younger Visentini’s more sophisticated, media-based, urban vision: an English lawn, shady trees, and, yes, a vegetable patch (because Giampaolo is a gourmet and fresh greens are tastier), but run along ecological, natural-food lines (because Giampaolo, like any modern man, is also something of a Green). Thus Vittorina not only had to work the communal vegetable patch under the tall bare wall of Negretti’s grim house but, to add to her troubles, she wasn’t allowed to poison the quite multitudinous snails. It all came out in the food, her younger neighbour scared her. We would all die of cancer.

  And that was one battle Giampaolo won. Indeed, whenever Vittorina took up a position on something it was always clear she was going to lose. A bulky, heavy-breathing woman, she prayed a great deal, had Masses said for her husband, visited the cemetery almost daily and subscribed to such periodicals as I miracoli di Sant’Antonio and La salvezza. Her face had a morose wisdom which would occasionally light up in genuine friendliness. One suspected she was already resigned to losing the quarrels of this world, banking on the next. A pushover for the persuasive, courteous and always well-informed Giampaolo.

  However, since Giampaolo only rented his flat, whereas the others owned, when it came to getting trees or bushes for the garden proper, Lucilla insisted on choosing and locating them herself (Giampaolo was quick to disclaim responsibility). The result was one of the very saddest collections of dwarf cypresses and ornamental mutants imaginable, unhealthy things picked up in sales and planted apparently at random across two hundred square metres of dry lawn. A funereal tone was everywhere apparent and, indeed, it occurred to us that Lucilla had probably never been into a garden that wasn’t a cemetery. There were no gardens in her poverty-stricken youth and most of her life had been spent operating an industrial cleaning business from a small suburban flat. Whereas the early death of her husband and various relatives had made her all too familiar with cemeteries.

  To her credit, Lucilla was aware that something was wrong with the garden at number 10, aware that this gloomy assortment of dull evergreens was not really what she was after. In the hope of achieving some improbable rightness, she would thus, Giampaolo explained, move the trees about year after year, dig one up, shift it a metre or two this way, dig up another, swop it with yet another, put this one in the shade, move that one out of it, and so on and so forth, so that the weary plants became sadder and sadder while the business of mowing the lawn in Via Colombare now involved a dizzy weaving back and forth through the lost labour of Lucilla’s search for harmony.

  And of course the lawn had to be mowed regularly. Giampaolo was strict about this. Regularly and very low. Because it had to be an English lawn, as the Italians imagine English lawns to be, an extension, that is, of the meticulous formal elegance of the Visentini’s flat, licked clean from top to bottom day in day out with sacrificial anality. Yes, Giampaolo said at our first condominium meeting when my duties were outlined, the lawn had to be mowed twice or three times a week from spring through autumn and the cuttings had to be gathered with a rake and piled on a compost heap in the most hidden corner of the garden where shameful things like compost heaps are piled. It should be said here, in Giampaolo’s defence, that most surrounding gardeners of the cemetery variety just had their grass taken away by the refuse men, and this was the easy solution that Lucilla, if not Vittorina, would undoubtedly have plumped for. But being a Green, Giampaolo rightly insisted that grass was a limited resource to be husbanded and utilised – along the snail-infested wall …

  Never has good neighbourliness been more onerous, as, with the two ladies unable to handle the mower and no one willing to pay for a gardener, I was enlisted into the ritual twice-weekly mowing. And daily watering. For the lawn had to be watered assiduously throughout the hot summer, and most particularly it had to be watered at the front of the house where the terrace balconies of the two lower flats were only a metre or so above quite a few square metres of grass below, depriving the grass of water, but not light, since a low slanting sun shafted in of an evening to shrivel the poor plants up.

  How we mowed and mowed that lawn. And how many hours I was to spend distractedly pointing a hose pipe at those doomed patches of grass beneath the balconies, which were so important of course, being amongst the most visible, through iron railings, from the dusty street. To make matters worse it was assumed that, being English, I would naturally know a great deal about lawns and my advice, as we settled in, would frequently be sought on dry patches, ringmoulds, moss, etc., as if such knowledge were carried in the genes. I thus got used to observing a genuine sense of disappointment when it was discovered that I knew nothing, but nothing about lawns. And what’s more (to my shame now, actually) showed every sign of not greatly caring.

&nbs
p; Giampaolo: ‘What kind of fertiliser do you think we should put on the lawn toward the end of summer?’

  Me, with a shake of the head: ‘The cheapest.’

  ‘Do you think we should leave the cut grass down this time, or rake it up?’

  ‘Oh, let’s leave it. Good idea.’ But my enthusiasm was too evident, and very soon it was understood that my opinion could be ignored, and that I wouldn’t even mind if it were not solicited. Which was a relief. And to salve any conscience I might have had, I reflected that at least I was doing my neighbours the favour of demonstrating the hollowness of national stereotypes.

  9

  La stagione è finita

  SOMETIMES WHEN I wasn’t actually called upon to participate in the garden, I would watch the others from the big window in our salotto. For, ironically, ours was the only flat with a good upper-storey view of the garden. I thus observed that, while the old ladies followed the seasons, Giampaolo went by the book. Or rather, it wasn’t quite the seasons Lucilla and Vittorina followed, but the rigid set of proverbs and rules a thousand years of peasant culture offered them. Some of which they themselves, having spent their adult lives in industrial cleaning, remembered only approximately. I recall in mid-September going out into the garden for a couple of tomatoes (just reward for all that mowing), to discover to my amazement that not only were there none left, but the plants themselves had gone, disappeared, been uprooted, the ground already forked over and raked.

  ‘When Lucilla decides the season’s over, she tears them up,’ Orietta told me. Her voice was still completely neutral as it had been at all our early meetings. But now a half-smile played about the lips, suggesting the possibility of future confidences. ‘She’s pulled up the peppers too and the aubergines. It’s the same every year.’