Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  No sooner had the splendid idea been put forward than building began in earnest all over the peninsula. Of course, the law would refer only to buildings completed some months before it was initially drawn up. But if a building isn’t registered it is not always easy to say exactly when it was built. And perhaps the government didn’t really care, since finances were such (are always such) that the larger the injection of cash, the better.

  The law was passed by decree, quite normal practice, but a decree has to be ratified by parliament within sixty days. The condono was not ratified. Which was curious given the general enthusiasm. Some mischievous newspapers alleged that many of those MPs who voted against it were busy building their own illegal villas and eager to have them finished before the law was eventually passed, as they were sure it one day would be. But at the time, MPs had a secret vote in the Italian parliament, so it was impossible to tell who was involved.

  Along Via Colombare somebody knocked down a handsome old barn and began feverish work on a luxury extension, which pretty well amounted to a second house. Passing of the law was again delayed. Almost opposite the luxury extension, the woman who swept the road regularly with her twig broom began to lay the foundations of a two-car garage with terrace roof leading through French windows to the first floor of her house. Wielding her broom, she bustled about the old workers in their dungarees with their bottles of wine and tupperware boxes full of cold pasta.

  The law was now passed. But then the deadline for applications for the condono was waived on two or three occasions. To give a little respite. All over Italy the cement mixers rumbled; work went on apace. And I remember walking back along the more than usually dusty street one day, to find in number 10’s postbox one of those magazines that somehow always find their way to ex-pats: Investment International, or some such title. They tell you how to send your children to English boarding schools, how to invest your money in offshore tax havens, how to prepare for the mental shock of return, how to let your Mayfair flat in your absence, etc. etc. On this particular occasion a review of European stockmarkets remarked, of la Borsa di Milano, that one could do no better than invest in Italcementi, the state-controlled cement company. Cement in Italy, the article said, had miraculously out-performed all other kinds of stock, thanks to the vigour, the creativity and the enterprising spirit of both manufacturers and building contractors. So much for the foreign perspective.

  In Via Colombare we got a new fence to protect the really rather attractive beige-stuccoed, copper-drained three-bedroom extension which had replaced the old barn (beautiful, full of swallows nests, but no longer functional). The fence was made of tall, spiky, brown-painted iron railings sunk into a marble-topped cement wall, and it ended in a sheltered, terracotta-tiled entrance way complete with video-camera security. The tiny garden between the fence and the villa extension respected the cemetery style of dwarf cypresses and biblically inspired stucco statues. Opposite, the woman with the twig broom now swept her terrace of a morning, as well as the remaining half of the patio and a fair stretch of road outside.

  But in the end this was a fairly innocuous form of anarchy. For around this time we took a week off to visit friends who live in the suburbs of Rome. Their house, a legal part of a new development, had simply been smothered by new building, much of it of the crudest variety, breeze blocks placed one on top of another with prefab roof, just enough to claim the condono and have the authorities accept the existence of a building which could then be developed in the future. Many houses were without utilities. Next door, the owner had converted the ground floor of his house into a bodywork repair outfit, blocking the narrow road outside with dented cars. Our friends had called the local vigile about the noise, the smell of spray paint, the inconvenience, reminding him that this was a residential area. The vigile went to talk with the culprit and apparently took a bribe.

  Italian stories. One hears them more or less daily.

  Back in number 10, there were various reasons for asking for the condono. The palazzo was a metre or so too near Negretti’s house. Then the solai, for example, had tiled floors, whereas to remain in the tax bracket the house was in, they should have been left bare and ‘non-inhabitable’. The same was true of the garage and the taverna. One has a building inspected, is the trick, its tax bracket declared, and then one changes it at will: peeling shutters in the city centre conceal luxury window fittings; pitted, flaking stucco is a front for polished parquet, granite and gold bathroom fittings. Everybody’s at it. The humble façade, the lavish interior. Tall, glass-topped walls. Secretiveness.

  Eventually, it was decided at condominium level (that is, by Lucilla) that number 10 would not ask for the condono. Because in the end it wasn’t free, was it? However small, the fine would still have to be paid. And why bother? Lucilla was indignant. Nobody had really done anything wrong, had they? Nobody had hurt anybody. Anyway, the chances of the authorities ever catching you were infinitesimal; otherwise they would never have introduced the condono in the first place. And it was so dangerous to draw attention to yourself. Once they had your name in black and white, heaven knows what they might find out.

  Lucilla was right. Some years later an income tax condono was passed by decree. People would ‘reconstruct their tax careers’, paying a modest fine. Thus the government would know how much tax to expect from such people in the future. But almost nobody applied for the pardon, since the very fact that the government had introduced it was an admission of their inability or unwillingness to catch anyone. Parliament then voted out the decree after the sixty days. This meant that while, over the previous two months, it had officially been the law, it was now considered never to have been the law at all. Upon which a few zealous magistrates attempted to prosecute those guilty few who had somewhat hastily confessed to their tax crimes in the hope of getting in regola. A lesson for the rest of us if ever there was one.

  15

  Discreto, valido, relativo

  IF LUCILLA’S MOST common expression was the flattering and subservient, troppo gentile, troppo gentile, a social tick she had presumably picked up in her deprived girlhood of floor-scrubbing and straightforward begging, Giampaolo Visentini’s most characteristic utterances were always built around the three words: discreto, valido, relativo.

  Imagine you are sitting in the Visentinis’ tastefully and above all cautiously furnished sitting-room. You are drinking excellent prosecco which Giampaolo bottled himself, which he has put in the fridge three or four days before your planned evening get-together (in the back of the fridge, not the door, since that would involve its getting knocked around too much). Upon your arrival and acceptance of the offered treat, he has carried the bottle from kitchen through dining-room to sitting-room with the concentration of a bomb disposal expert shifting primed Semtex, has released the detonating cork ever so gently to prevent explosion, then tilted the bottle painstakingly slowly over an attractive pottery carafe bearing the name of some Sardinian seaside town – all this because it’s so desperately important to avoid disturbing the sediment which is both the hallmark and curse of home-bottled wines. Giampaolo watches intently as he pours, brow knitted, long pale fingers strong and steady, his whole attitude conveying the slightly glazed worshipful concentration of the devotee. The contents froth out, the carafe fills, the sediment, which would have given the wine an unpleasant acidy taste, remains safely in the bottle and – ecco fatto, done it! Being bourgeois, it might be said, is never an easy way out in Italy.

  Of course, if this is your first evening with the Visentini, if this is the first time you have drunk home-bottled prosecco, the whole elaborate rigmarole will seem nothing short of ridiculous. You can barely hold back a giggle. The caricatures are true, you’re thinking. These Latins are obsessive about food and wine. What’s going to change your mind is when you actually taste the prosecco.

  And here at last it is. Lovingly as ever, but more relaxed now, Giampaolo pours from the carafe into tall slim glasses. ‘Salute.’ You rais
e a crystal stem. The cold sharp taste stings the lips, demands attention. It’s desperately dry, cutting like a knife through the sweetness of whatever goodies are being handed out. And as it fills your mouth, you become aware of wanting to hold it there. Bubbles froth on the palate. You are drinking something special.

  So there you are, perched on geometrically arranged chairs about a rug of soberly coloured squares and rectangles surrounded by polished tiles, chinking your tall glass with your host’s. The Visentinis’ daughter is there too: Lara, named after the heroine in Dr Zhivago. A strapping twelve-year-old, she giggles merrily when Rita cracks a joke. I’m offering compliments about the wine, asking if it is the same that we will be bottling together in the spring. There are the makings of a pleasant evening.

  But Giampaolo is so solemn. And, perhaps not wishing to discuss wine with a layman, he launches into serious conversation. He’s telling you about some new law. For he likes to talk about politics. Concerning drunk driving for example. Yes, the new law on drunk driving has been drawn up discretamente (quite well, with intelligence if not flair) and is in fact for the most part valido (sound, functional), but all of this is relativo (of only secondary importance) since the instruments for enforcing the law are not available, or if they are nobody has any intention of using them. He smiles, as if having performed a conjuring trick, takes a sparkling sip of prosecco, picks up another piece of pastafrolla.

  And the formula, you discover as the evening progresses, can be applied to almost any area of life upon which Giampaolo cares to reflect. The Italian system of autostrade, he is telling you now, is definitely discreto, road surfaces and markings are always valido, but all this tends to be relativo since, with the exorbitant price of petrol and the very high tolls, one would need to be rich indeed before one could use it with any regularity.

  Another long sip of this extraordinary wine.

  Likewise efficiency in Italian companies, such as his own, is certainly discreto, the managerial class indubitably valido, but again these pluses are rendered relativo by a public sector which simply sucks blood from the rest of the economy.

  And so, if you encourage him, he will go on all evening: the constitution, the electoral system, the TV networks; discreto, valido, relativo. It is a curious and, I believe, curiously Italian stalemate, in which ineradicable national pride (and why not?) exists side by side with a sense of cynicism (equally justifiable) and, at the end of the day, resignation. The judicial system has been ‘conceived discretamente bene’, and the constitution in this regard is undoubtedly valido, in that it establishes the total independence of the judiciary. But whatever the institutional make-up, it is inevitably only relativo given the endemic corruption that always allows the mafiosi to get off scot-free.

  The mental pattern propagates itself like someone cutting pastry (or pastafrolla) with a die, or pouring wine into tall glasses. There is no question of simply showing anger or outrage for all the things that make the country a less attractive place to live than it might so easily be. The blunt analysis and sleeve-rolling gaucheness which forms the typical reaction of, for example, the English, inevitably carries the subtext that something could and should be done, and quickly: reform the poll tax, cut inflation, dump Thatcher, etc. etc. English people usually believe such things to be possible, or at least imaginable. But the Italian knows that nothing can or will be done in his country, and that if it is done it certainly will not be done quickly. This is his experience. After all, with all the shifting coalitions and merry-go-round of prime ministers, most people here haven’t seen a real change of government in their lifetime. Thus an Italian’s satisfaction, when he talks about politics, will lie in feeling that he has analysed the situation accurately, appreciated its ironies, seen the pros and the cons, absorbed the subtleties, and above all gone beyond the crude simplicity of foreigners who talk in ingenuous terms about changing things.

  Discreto, valido, relativo – not one of them is a particularly complimentary or pejorative term. They are the cool words of the astute analyst, the man who looks at the whole show from a distance, then goes about his business as he would have done anyway, regardless, but happy to have had the chance to illustrate his powers of observation. In the final analysis: ‘La legge non mi tange.’

  Fortunately there is Orietta’s gossip to brighten up the evening. Lucilla has apparently called on the priest, Don Guido, to be a witness in the case she is bringing against Signora Marta. He has agreed. Which is interesting. And did we know that Lucilla has a fancy man? Simone, an ex-carabiniere. Yes, he comes three or four evenings a week. The daughter giggles and begins to explain about the vacuum cleaner. Lucilla has what must be a pre-war vacuum cleaner, but recently she has been borrowing Orietta’s (Vittorina doesn’t have one), claiming that her own is broken. Whereas, in fact, Lara, the daughter, saw Simone, the carabiniere fancy man, bumping down the stairs with the thing only a week ago.

  To mend it? To use it? Can’t he afford one?

  Anyway, this is becoming a problem, Orietta says, since there’s so much dust about these days with all the building going on in the street. She needs to use the thing herself two or three times a day.

  Everybody nods gravely.

  Orietta is small, doll-like, and clearly perfectly attuned to sedentary domestic life. She doesn’t have a job, but every corner of the room shows evidence of her tireless cleaning. Only the other morning I watched her diligently polishing inch after inch of the long marble balustrade of the terrace balcony. There was concentration on her face, satisfaction, the devotion of the accolyte cleaning the altar. Not unlike her husband’s expression while pouring his prosecco. Later we will discover that, when Giampaolo wanted to accept a more dynamic job in a much smaller company, Orietta forbade him. It wasn’t safe.

  She is also scared of earthquakes.

  And of every possible disease. Thus, as so often with Italian acquaintances, we are not far into our first evening with the Visentini before Orietta is discussing her blood pressure. Which is a mite high. She shouldn’t have more than two coffees a day. Also she occasionally gets attacks of tachycardia. She is appalled to discover that I don’t even know my own blood pressure. As far as I know it has never been taken. Her face shows genuine concern. Apparently, we are touching on a real cultural difference here.

  Orietta explains that after feeling somewhat faint a few days ago the doctor arranged for her to have an exhaustive series of blood and urine tests, together with an electrocardiogram and a heart scan. She has thus been getting up early every morning to get to the hospital, wait in all the queues, fill in all the forms and fix all the appointments. She remembers last time she had a blood test her bilirubin was way outside the norms indicated on the test sheet, whereas cholesterol A was thankfully low.

  I remark that I have never, to my knowledge, had a blood test. I don’t even know my group.

  Lara had a rash a few weeks ago on face and chest. Although this cleared up almost immediately, she too was sent off for complete blood and urine tests, including tests for such things as syphilis. It appeared that her trigliceridi were rather high.

  I can’t decide if this is surprisingly intimate or rather frightening, or both. And I remember our landlady, Signora Marta, fiddling with her keys at the gate that first day, talking about her gynaecological problems.

  With the gravity of a Houyhnhnm, Giampaolo takes this opportunity to reflect that, on the whole, public hospitals in Verona function discretamente bene, when compared with hospitals in other areas of Italy, and of course the idea behind the health system as it was initially conceived is indubitably valido. However, it has to be admitted that the apparent success of the local system is del tutto relativo since, if all the people who presently go private were to turn to the public system, it would break down in a matter of days.

  Lucilla for example, and Vittorina.

  ‘Really? They go private? But they’re not particularly well off, are they?’

  Giampaolo explains that the old w
omen go to a local health-service doctor whom they tip generously. When they have any tests to do, he always tells them to go to a private clinic, of which he, as it so happens, is a director. And they pay a lot of money. And say, troppo gentile, Dottore, troppo gentile.

  We thus discover that it is not so much, or by no means only the upper middle class and the important executive who go private in Italy. Above all it is the ignorant, the workers and peasant class who have tucked something away in their deposit box or in a few government bonds. They can’t believe the public system can work and then, of course, it’s a status symbol to say, I am going to my private gynaecologist, my private cardiologist, my private paediatrician. From whom, more often than not, they will get no receipt.

  Rita tells a joke her mother made up when her father Adelmo kept going to the hospital for tests upon tests upon tests. It goes like this. What does a German do in the morning? He jumps out of bed, grabs a cup of coffee and rushes off to work. What does an American do in the morning? He climbs out of bed, sips a cup of coffee, reads the paper for ten minutes and strolls off to work. What does an Italian do?

  Long pause. Puzzlement of the Visentini in their spic-and-span sitting-room.

  Urinates in a bottle and sets off to the hospital!

  Only Lara truly thinks this is funny. The others have a sort of pained smile. Health is so important. Not for nothing did we say ‘Salute’ when we raised those glasses.

  And Orietta touches her face. Do we think she should have her mole removed? This little one in the dimple on her cheek. She’s afraid it may be growing. No it’s not very visible because she powders it. Her doctor said to leave well alone, but she went for a second opinion and that doctor said to have a biopsy done. At a private clinic, Giampaolo adds.