Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  Idly, Lara picks up the remote control and the television flicks on. With its usual brutality, the news is showing yet another Mafia killing. Corruption on a more impressive scale. The scene is always the same: the car caught at the traffic lights, riddled with bullets, the corpses in a heap on the front seats, perhaps an arm thrown out of the shattered window, blood trickling down on to the asphalt, spotlights all round for the TV cameras. They have shot General Dalla Chiesa, chief of police in Sicily.

  Giampaolo plays with the controls to his motorised aerial on the roof to enable us to get a better view. Weeping relatives are being asked how they feel.

  We finish our prosecco and go upstairs. Leaning out over the balcony to get some fresh air we are lucky enough to witness the departure of Simone, the ex-carabiniere. He’s solid, sixtyish, thick head of bristling grey hair, and he has a package under his arm. Too small to be a vacuum cleaner though. He fiddles for the keys to his Fiat 128 parked a hair’s breadth from our iron fence. Lucilla appears on her balcony, barely ten feet away across the façade of the building, although she hasn’t noticed us. In the swinging light of the overhead streetlamp we can see she is heavily made up, dressed to the nines, wearing higher than usual heels, decidedly Felliniesque. She leans over the parapet and begins to whisper enticingly: ‘Simone, Simone caro, when will you phone? Simone, when are you coming to dinner again?’ One imagines him glimpsing her long teeth as he slides down into his car with the heavy sigh of one who has overeaten. Ciao, bella, he calls. She stands watching after him, pensive, huge breasts uplifted. It’s sad to think of this woman being taken for a ride by her doctor. But then, as Rita remarks, she probably paid no tax in the good old days of the cleaning company, so it all works out in the end.

  For the next few weeks I practise discreto, valido and relativo on any and every subject that comes up.

  16

  Una bustarella

  THEY HAD SHOT General Dalla Chiesa, the man who had defeated terrorism, the man the government had appointed to defeat the Mafia. About the same time, a very close friend of mine paid his first bribe to a state official. These two facts are not perhaps entirely unrelated.

  It’s a complicated story, perhaps a little bit of a digression, but I’d like to tell it all the same because it shows how even the ingenuous foreigner who arrives here, as one arrives most places, more or less by chance, can so easily run up against the dark side of Italy.

  This was an extremely close friend of mine. Like me he had arrived in Italy some time before, like me he lived in a little village not far from a sizeable town, like me he had grafted for a while with private lessons and commercial translations until good fortune had landed him one of the much sought-after jobs teaching English at the university, a position offering a decent, steady income for work that is pleasant and not overly taxing. He was delighted. Now he could relax a little. No more the breathless hurry to get from one lesson to the next, only to find the student has cancelled. No more the embarrassment of having to insist that patently rich people deign to pay one with a certain regularity. No more the smell of white-out in the early hours labouring over translations on the recycling of waste sludge in marble saw-mills, the unsurpassable tourist attractions of the nearby town. He was home and dry.

  But the contract they made him sign at the university was a strange one. Although to all intents and purposes an employee, in the sense that he had a timetable and certain well-established duties, he was in fact officially free lance, the university retaining 18 per cent of his income as tax (had he not had residenza they would have retained 20 per cent), but paying no health contributions and requiring him to declare the money on a free-lance basis.

  Now, since this friend of mine had a VAT number which he used for his translations, he went to the university accounts office to ask them what exactly his tax situation might be. Complicated, they said, and went into great detail. Which he didn’t entirely understand. For Italian tax law might well be written in hieroglyphics for all the average citizen can understand of it. Never mind a foreigner. Rather than on actual income, everything seems to depend on the category of worker you are (artisan, lawyer, doctor, plumber, farmer, shopkeeper …) and the nature of the work you do (regular, casual, occasional, for one client, for various, etc. etc.), with different rules applying for each different category, different tax brackets, different deductions, different percentages for national insurance and so on and so forth. So that at the end of the explanation, which might also have been described with the much used Italian substantive, mistificazione, my sensible friend demanded to know the bottom line: could he retain his VAT number, do a few translations, and do the job at the university without paying VAT on it.

  They said yes. And made him sign something. The usual documento. They also said that even if he did want to charge VAT on the job, they wouldn’t pay it, but would deduct it from his salary.

  Had any of the other thirty or so lettori opted for this alternative? he asked.

  And was told none. Because it wasn’t necessary.

  But being a cautious lad, my friend also had an accountant. And went to see him. To clear the matter up. The accountant, however, could do nothing more than offer a second equally mystifying ‘explanation’ which simply defied comprehension, perhaps because, as the accountant readily admitted, the law in many areas was not only unclear, but frankly contradictory. It also changed with great regularity, and often government decrees, which were officially law, were not ratified by parliament and thus not only ceased to be law but were deemed never to have been law in the first place. Basically, my friend could do what he wanted. Since everybody else at the university was doing precisely that, my friend took this wise advice. He worked, he got paid and, at least in this regard, was happy.

  Four years later he received a small white card in his mailbox. From the VAT office. He was required to present himself with great urgency, indeed within a date already past, for the printed card had taken more than a week to travel the six kilometres from the centre of town to his modest flat in the outlying village.

  He got on his moped and rushed into town, found the VAT office, showed his card at reception, and was directed along a maze of corridors to a huge office whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling, door to door, with box files bulging with tax declarations. It quickly became apparent that the four moustached men behind four gun-metal desks were sorting through the VAT declarations of four years before.

  My friend was breathing heavily because he had made it just in time. Like most offices in Italy, this one was open only in the morning since, unlike employees in the private sector, civil servants enjoy a 36-hour week, six mornings, six hours a day. It was now ten to one.

  He handed his card to an older, weary, dusty, bespectacled man behind a huge, dusty heap of papers coloured the kind of garish pink and yellow that forms can be. In parenthesis, I find it is curious how colouring forms does nothing to make them more attractive. Rather the colours themselves, become, by association, somewhat frightening: those tissue blues, washed out mauves.

  He apologised for the delay but the post had been slow. The man said the date was a formality and of no relevance. He then proceeded to look for the English teacher’s VAT return out of the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, which not only lined the wall, but were arrayed in great barriers of box files between the desks.

  When the document was finally found, it emerged that while my friend had been wise perhaps to realise he needed an accountant, he had been unlucky in his choice. For the accountant had made a mistake. In the declaration of four years before, he had mentioned the university income and stated that it was exempt from VAT, but without indicating the code that would explain this exemption. The dusty old man now wanted my friend to tell him which code it was, so that he could write it in the space and the completed form be filed away and forgotten.

  In passing, it’s worth pointing out here that had the accountant filled in that space with any code, even a non-existent
one, there would most likely have been no problem. For Italian tax inspection appears to be mainly involved in finding contradictory statements within any given declaration. Only very rarely do inspectors go out of their offices to see if the lifestyle of the taxpayer bears any resemblance to his declaration. Thus it is common and frequently repeated wisdom (in the bars in Montecchio for example) that it is far better to make no declaration at all than an incomplete or even minimally incorrect one. A line made all the more attractive by the fact that in this case one doesn’t have to worry with an accountant. When Francesco Pazienza, a millionaire entrepreneur, was arrested in connection with the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano and the death of director Roberto Calvi (hung under Blackfriars Bridge), it emerged that he had never made a tax declaration in his life, nor ever bothered with a tax code. He had thus never run up against the kind of problems experienced by my friend. And the same could probably be said of one or two people within striking distance of Via Colombare.

  But the story that follows will offer a certain justification for that apparently antisocial kind of behaviour.

  For my friend now made a terrible mistake. Lulled into a false sense of security by the bland innocuousness of this man with dust in his wrinkles and along the rims of his spectacles and peppering his anyway grey moustache, he said, truthfully, that he didn’t know what code it might be. The man kindly suggested that he go away, consult his accountant, and return with this information inside a week or two. But here the young foreigner was quite criminally ingenuous, a born victim. He didn’t want, he said, to have to return over such a small matter, nor to have to go and consult his accountant. It took him more than half an hour every time he came into town. Surely if he told the old man the nature of the work, he in turn could produce the code; they could then write it down and all would be over.

  On the desk there was a little carousel of rubber stamps of all shapes and sizes, some adjustable, some not. The old man tapped the thing with his finger and it began to turn, squeaking slightly. Perhaps this was a warning.

  Unheeded. My friend told him the nature of the work. Indeed of all his work. As a person who has nothing to fear from investigation and authority.

  The older man became more interested, licked the dust off his lips, said he couldn’t say offhand what code that would be; they would have to go and talk to a colleague.

  The maze of passages again, grey carpets, fluorescent light. Indeed, apart from the occasional crucifix hanging under the heating pipes near the ceiling, this could perfectly well be an Inland Revenue office in Wapping or Huntingdon. But it isn’t.

  In another gloomy but more private office the colleague is of an entirely different variety. He is young, sanguine, peremptory and dust-free, despite the tomes and papers on his desk.

  Such work, he pronounces, after hearing the story, should not have been exempt from VAT. There is no question of there being a code.

  But my friend has a document provided for him by the university accountants whom he consulted precisely over this question.

  Already he appreciates what a mistake he has made. But it is too late.

  A document from the university? The younger man is scornful. No accountant worth his salt would be working at the university, getting only a million and a half a month. Would he? How could they advise him? In any event my friend, as a resident and contributor, is personally responsible for paying his taxes regardless of any advice received – even, the man adds triumphantly, if such incorrect advice were to come from this very office.

  The dusty man has stayed to listen. Warming his hands over the radiator he looks out over the window at a building identical to the one the three of them are in, five, six stories, white concrete, regular square windows. In every room all the typewriters are supplied by Olivetti, as they should be.

  ‘And you’re still working at the university?’ The sanguine inspector has assumed an interrogator’s tone.

  Yes.

  So that this has been going on for four years?

  Yes.

  During which time your remuneration has been what?

  My friend tells him. The other man’s fingers are extraordinarily rapid on the keyboard of a calculator. ‘You have evaded VAT for around nine million Lire,’ he says.

  But as the English teacher gasps, makes to protest, the inspector has suddenly become friendly. ‘However, we should see this document you mentioned and your contract before we go into detail. Why don’t you bring them in?’

  He smiles, goes to pick up his coat. Is it because he’s realised that it is time for him to go home for lunch? Or is there some other reason.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, when you like. But don’t forget.’

  Leaving the building, my friend reflects that this kind of vagueness is more disconcerting than comforting. As was the unexpectedly pally smile on the young man’s previously severe face. Extremely anxious as he is, he wants the matter settled at once, not left hanging over his head. And so he rushes things. When perhaps he might have been wiser to do what Orietta would no doubt have advised: had his blood pressure checked, waited till it had fallen.

  In any event, he calls his accountant immediately, from a phone box outside the tax office, and tells him the story. At no point does the accountant apologise for his original mistake. If his client wishes, he says, he will go and talk to the tax office about it himself, but perhaps before he does so, it would be better if my friend got the document in question and the contract, took it to the inspectors, stressed his ingenuousness and insisted on his good faith. He has not, after all, pocketed any money in VAT and then avoided paying it to the state, as perhaps a shopkeeper might. He has merely omitted to charge the client VAT on top of the regular price, always assuming he was in fact supposed to do so. In this way he has not profited from the situation at all. Nor will the state have lost through the university’s having detracted from their own VAT payments any monies supposedly paid to him.

  My friend, however, is losing his nerve. He positively flaunts his anxiety by returning to the tax office with his documents the very next day. First there’s the dusty man again, then the sanguine man, the one drily polite, apologetic, apparently innocuous, the other tougher, dismissive, immediately assuming the attitude of one who is fed up of hearing cock-and-bull stories.

  Allora?

  Here is the document.

  The younger man looks at it; the older is window-gazing again. The document quotes three or four different laws, sections, paragraphs, amendments – convincing pomposity.

  ‘Incompetenti’ is the comment, and the VAT man opens a tome on his desk, finds a page, begins to read rapidly out loud from one of the laws cited. My friend, who is actually a dab hand at translating complex commercial insurance documents, can’t quite follow it. Somehow it all depends on whether his non-university jobs are continuativi (regular) or saltuari (occasional). He earns, he says, about ten million a year from translations from a variety of clients, some new, some old, but he would be hard-pressed to say if this added up to continuativo or saltuario. The words surely require more precise definition.

  The sanguine man undergoes one of his mistifying changes of behaviour. He smiles, he is relaxed. ‘Sì, sì, sono d’accordo,’ he agrees. And adds: ‘Five in ten people would probably feel you were in the right.’

  ‘After all, given that I’ve made nothing out of it, no one can deny I’m in good faith.’

  ‘D’accordo, d’accordo.’

  The dusty man turns from the window to watch. My friend is smiling, seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The accountant seems to have advised him well.

  Then the younger man lifts a hand to his face, touches his cheek, and says very politely: ‘Though good faith is no defence under law, only a mitigating circumstance.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘And my interpretation remains, that you should have been paying VAT, that you have evaded VAT for a sum of approximately nine million Lire, and that you are thus subject to r
epayment of that sum, plus further payment of a fine.’

  Flabbergasted, my friend can barely get out: ‘How much?’

  ‘Fines are usually equal to the amount evaded. A further nine million, with some reduction if you pay immediately, of course.’

  A total of eighteen million Lire, or about eight thousand pounds. With his back to the window now the older man doesn’t bat a dusty eyelid.

  ‘But only a moment ago you said interpretation could go either way.’

  ‘Naturally you could appeal against this and the judgement could indeed go either way. Which would clarify the law most usefully in situations of this kind. In the meantime you would be obliged to pay 33 per cent of monies due as a first instalment. You would also lose any possible reduction for immediate payment.’

  My friend and the inspector are of about the same age and build. They stare at each other across the desk. One in disbelief, the other almost quizzical. And at last my friend plays his first smart move, even though his original idea is merely to gain time. He explains that some of his colleagues have recently fought and won a case to be recognised as employees of the university, not free-lance workers, this means that the job cannot be considered as subject to VAT. And recognition was retrospective. It would cover this period.

  The sanguine man caresses his chin, narrows his eyes. He reminds my friend that in Italy the decision of a court does not establish precedence. It merely offers one interpretation of the existing law. The verdict in favour of his colleagues, if such a verdict exists, thus refers exclusively to those who fought the case, not to him. A second judge could perfectly well decide differently in his case. His status thus remains the same, and as far as he, the inspector, is concerned VAT has been evaded to the tune of 9 million. As an employee of the government he has a duty to collect evaded taxes and to punish those who evade them.