Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  For the first time my friend lies, and this is another step forward. ‘But I have begun my own case too,’ he says. He is trembling.

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘So at present, in a way, everything is sub iudice.’

  There is a long hard pause, much eye contact. The dusty man pouts, coughs drily. Finally the younger inspector politely invites my friend to come back once again, this time with a copy both of the sentence of the case won by his colleagues and of his lawyer’s presentation of his own case to the Tribunale del Lavoro.

  Which of course he hasn’t got. Looking back at the building as he leaves, my friend remembers The Castle, the courtrooms of The Trial. Immediately, he phones his accountant. The avuncular man, in yet another cluttered office complete with crucifix, is kind and genuinely concerned. He hadn’t initially wanted to go and speak to the tax people personally since, ‘Finora io e te abbiamo sempre collaborato in modo amichevole’: i.e., ‘So far you have paid me under the table and I haven’t given you a receipt for my services or in any way indicated in my books that you are a client of mine.’ However, at this point he agrees it is time he went to talk to these people. Yes, he knows who it must be.

  A nail-biting week. During which, to pass the time, and then, because, once there’s an itch you have to scratch it, my friend goes to the university accounts office and again enquires, as if merely to reassure himself, about his tax position. Again he hears, as he did four years ago, that there is no need for him to pay VAT on his university income. He then tells the accountant, a forty-year-old man with the dress style of someone determined to stay young, an expensive mixture of Armani, Gianfranco Ferrè and Benetton, that the VAT office thinks otherwise and is at this very moment asking him to pay a heavy fine. To which the other man replies with great promptness that he can in no way be held responsible for the advice he gives. A brief slanging match follows, since this is one person, my friend feels, he can give a piece of his very worried mind to with impunity. As always, Christ looks on from his own particular cross. Plastic in this case.

  Finally, the accountant phones. He has talked to the VAT people. Could my friend come into his office. They can’t discuss it on the telephone.

  And in the office he says: ‘They want a Christmas present.’

  ‘Prego?’

  ‘Una bustarella.’ A little envelope. A bribe.

  ‘Did they say so?’

  ‘God forbid.’

  So how does he know?

  He knows. And this burly accountant with thick bushy eyebrows now proceeds with nostalgic revelry to launch into the story of the very first time he offered a bribe. Oh, twenty years ago. He simply became so exasperated with the obtusity of the official he was dealing with that he said, ‘OK, how much do you want?’ and then fell silent, stunned by his own rashness. What if he had read the signals wrong? But he hadn’t.

  Later he learned the trick of dropping an envelope on the floor and asking the other if he had dropped it there. Another important indicator was if the official invited you out for a coffee.

  It occurs to me, writing this down, that this sort of breathtaking breaking of cover – the dropping of the envelope, the invitation to coffee – is not unlike one’s first declaration of attraction to a possible lover; there’s sudden intimacy and self-exposure. It’s exhilarating.

  And, my friend tells me, his accountant was indeed exhilarated. In this case, the man began to explain, he had understood that they wanted a bribe, because otherwise they would have already proceeded to fill in the document requiring him to pay the fine. After which, there could be no turning back, the matter would be officially registered. And had my friend really evaded so much VAT, they would almost certainly have proceeded with the matter and nailed him. As it was, appreciating he was merely a victim of circumstance, they were inclined to let him off the hook in return for a small Christmas present …

  ‘How much?’

  Two days later the accountant phones to say the matter in question would cost 800,000 Lire. My friend should come to his office in a couple of days’ time to say whether he intends to pay.

  My friend is still very English. Though less than he was a month ago. In the past week he has joined a group of colleagues bringing a case against the university to be recognised as employees. So he now has a lawyer. An attractive young woman six months pregnant. And finding the idea of paying a bribe somehow offensive, the kind of awful initiation into a different way of life, a different state of mind, that theft or adultery might be, he phones this lawyer to discuss the problem. She is polite and patient, listening to the complex story. Until he gets to the bit about the little envelope, at which she suddenly becomes frantic. ‘Per l’amore di Dio we’re talking on the phone.’ Anyway, she will consult her accountant and ring back.

  Which she duly does. Indeed, it’s surprising how kind and helpful and civilised everybody is being. On the phone she’s calm, matter of fact: ‘The manner’, she says – and my friend has written her circumlocutions down because he finds them so amusing – ‘in which your accountant has chosen to resolve the particular difficulties in which, through no fault of your own, you find yourself, although perhaps not immediately attractive, and you do have my sympathy here, is nevertheless not so mistaken as you appear to think. If you follow his advice to the letter, I am sure you will be able to arrive at a soluzione felice without my help.’

  But another anxious week has definitely italianised my friend that little bit more. For rather than simply shelling out the 800,000, as it now seems he will have to, he points out to his accountant that since the VAT office’s complaint is based only on that one declaration of four years ago, they could perfectly well pull out the next declarations one by one, year by year, and have him over a barrel for the same amount again.

  The accountant accepts this. It is agreed the 800,000 will be paid only if the VAT office can dig up the other declarations and allow the accountant to change them, otherwise the sum must be renegotiated. The VAT men, whom my friend never saw again, and whose names he does not know, are likewise reasonable. No they can’t dig out the other declarations, yes they do appreciate the problem this represents, they will bring their request down to 400,000.

  Pride satisfied, my friend pays.

  ‘And 100,000 for me for negotiating the deal,’ the accountant says, with still no apology for his initial mistake. And no receipt.

  Before leaving the office, in the state of exhilaration that every initiation, every surrender of self, brings once one has decided to go through with it, my friend asks the accountant: ‘But it’s so little. Why would anyone corrupt themselves for so little?’

  ‘No accountant worth his salt,’ the burly man explains, ‘would work in the VAT office. How much can they be getting, two million a month? They have to supplement it. A 100,000 from you, a half a million from me, it all adds up. And the rules are a lot simpler than the written ones.’ Reflectively, as if this has occurred to him for the first time, he adds: ‘There’s only one person I know of in the VAT office who won’t take something sometime. Lucky it wasn’t him picked up your problem.’

  My friend walks out into the bright street with the feeling of one waking up from a nightmare. In the end he’s only lost two hundred and fifty odd quid. Not much to pay for a significant experience.

  17

  Una scampagnata

  AND WHEN YOU do wake up from such occasional nightmares, when you turn off the TV with its bullet-ridden cars and improbable corpses (eight in a single village in Sicily the very morning I write this), when you close the newspapers with their intricate political scandals from top to toe of the peninsula, it will often seem that you are living in paradise.

  There is no smell on the balcony this Montecchio morning. Perhaps because it is Sunday. The late October air has that look of water in a wineglass, so that one expects, on walking out of the front door, to step into a magic world. And magic it is. Old Marini’s blackbird whistles brightly, perhaps remembering how fine the
trees were on such sweet mornings, the sharp silhouettes of the hills, the nobly etched cypresses dark against the glowing gold of autumn cherry leaves.

  We wait in the street for the old ladies to return from Mass, then set off with them, Orietta, Giampaolo and Lara on a scampagnata, a long walk up into the hills. We are going to see Lucilla’s daughter, Marisa, who is not in fact her daughter, Lucilla now confides, but the child of a sister conceived and born adulterously while the husband was in prison and handed over to Lucilla at just a few weeks old to make the husband’s release less turbulent. Lucilla’s own and only child died at eighteen months, poveretto. From the long story she tells us about his illness it becomes clear that Lucilla quite probably provoked his death herself by applying scalding poultices to his entire body in an attempt to overcome some banal influenza. Shortly afterwards, a miscarriage led to her having la totale at only twenty. La totale is the grim Italian expression for a hysterectomy. Once again, I reflect that while people from the Veneto are generally reserved and formal, nevertheless when they get on to the subject of their health there is simply nothing, nothing they will not tell to the most casual acquaintance, from varicose veins to mastectomy, prostatitis to mere constipation. And, indeed, it’s not long before Rita, Vittorina and Orietta are discussing various forms of tisane, or herb concoctions, which help to keep one regular. Vittorina has a plastic bag to put camomile plants in as she walks along. A new shop, it appears, is to open next to Bepi’s and the girl is an excellent herbalist. She even has a mix for flatulence.

  I remember how rigorously my own parents avoided discussion of such complaints. That was the English omertà perhaps, our own peculiar conspiracy of secrecy. Orietta is tackling an overabundant period now. Much confabulation.

  To try Giampaolo on the subject, I remark that the other day the parent of a friend of ours informed us on very first meeting that her husband had only one testicle. Giampaolo neither laughs, nor winces, but with polite interest enquires: ‘Tuberculosis, or war wound?’

  We pass the Madonnina, at the end of the street, dead Christ on her lap, then a second tiny Madonna behind glass where the road leaving the village forks. O Gesù salvaci! – someone has attached a popular sticker to the wall just above. And how benign they are, these plaster guardians of dangerous junctions in their faded blue robes and dusty haloes, one hand inevitably raised in blessing. The glass has been polished. The Madonna is composed, wistful. A hundred metres further up the street, someone is still putting crysanthemums in a stone vase to mark the spot where a boy was killed on his motorino in the summer.

  We climb steeply out of Montecchio to Olivè where so many parents send their children to the convent school because there are never any strikes and the Church is more efficient than the state. There is building work going on in what was recently an orchard, but the cement mixers are silent on Sunday. To the left, a fine old farmhouse has been restored with a warm beige stucco that has a honey look to it in the now yellow morning light. The white chairs and tables on the terrace outside, the patently movable dwarf trees and statues arranged in geometric design, offer, in what was once a farmyard, a last testimony to urban invasion. From here on stile cimitero gives way definitively to flourishing vegetable patches. Olivè is solidly indigenous.

  A woman is attacking clothes with a soapstick at an outside sink. With every new fence a fierce dog barks. There’s no pavement and, parked up against the walls, the cheaper Fiats predominate, with the occasional tractor. Weathered old men in trilbies and Sunday best descend to Montecchio for the second Mass, lighting cigarettes.

  Then the asphalt gives way to dirt track. The road turns sharply left by a noble gate and goes into a steep cutting between high stone walls where a beautifully arched old bridge crosses above. With ivies hanging thick from the parapet, capers sprouting from the walls in vigorous tufts, the dust road almost white and the sky ever more deeply blue above, the scene seems made for one of those tiny paintings by Sisley or Pissarro that you find tucked away in the corners of rooms dedicated to grander canvases, paintings which convey such a sense of a single moment in a single place it is as if time has been made palpable. Even now, when I pass that turn in the road, I always remember it as it was that morning. It made such a picture.

  Lucilla is volubly discussing il professore again. How often they used to come on walks like this! How cultured he was. How polite! Vittorina shakes her head, pouting silently, as if to tell us Lucilla is inventing. Clearly we are never going to get to the bottom of this. ‘In my will,’ the fat woman puffs, ‘I’ve left everything to Marisa and Leone, but only on the understanding that they continue the case against Signora Marta.’ She shakes her fist. Odd, I think, how despite her loathing she continues to refer to the woman so politely as Signora Marta. As if cowed by her urban credentials.

  It’s a long walk. We meet the main road climbing the side of the valley but, since it goes up in a series of tight bends, we merely cross it, following a little path that strikes up steeply from one hairpin to the next. The old ladies are surprisingly energetic, Lucilla amazingly managing perfectly well in high heels on the chalky white soil of the path. She has a posh coat on, although not her fur, plus a frilly blouse, a pearl necklace. Her bright make-up, I fear, will soon begin to melt.

  Vittorina is plainer, but stalwart, peasant-solid with broad-brimmed straw hat, constantly bending down for her camomile. Orietta trails behind, already tired, limp. She hopes she won’t have an attack of tachycardia. Giampaolo has that fine proud, upright, urban gait so admirable in Italian men. He wears a fashionable jacket, good walking shoes. Every Latin black hair is in place on his polished head. Lara is chattering about her homework. At twelve her Italian teacher has set her an essay entitled: ‘La verità nella filosofia, nella matematica e nella fisica.’ It’s mind-boggling. But not so tricky, perhaps, as la verità in the VAT office.

  We are crossing another bend in the road when there is a sudden swishing sound, followed by grunts, heavy breathing. Turning round, it’s to discover a pack of young and not-so-young men standing on the pedals of their sparkling racing bikes as they attack what seems an impossible slope. To a man they are fully kitted out with the cycling shoes, the elastic kneelength pants, the fluorescent sweat shirts, the caps … Not one without the perfect gear. A mobile love affair with sports equipment. One can do little but gasp with admiration at the energy with which they attack this slope.

  ‘Not for someone with my blood pressure,’ Orietta shakes her head.

  ‘Or sloth,’ says her daughter. Giampaolo maintains his reserve. Mentally I rehearse: as a sport, valido; the design of the bikes, discreto; but pleasure rendered relativo by the fact that by the time you get back you’re fit for nothing but bath and bed.

  Comes a sudden cry of ‘Pista, pista!’ Make room! Out of the way! And from round the corner where the muscly backsides of the cyclists have just disappeared, flies a girl on wooden skis. The skis have small wheels at each end. The girl wobbles precariously, gives a heave on one of her ski-poles, and vanishes down the road – getting in vital practice for the season.

  In sharp contrast to these healthy activities and all the talk of herbs and remedies, we now pass a cypress in a small clearing whose trunk is bristling with used syringes stabbed into the bark. Nobody has anything to say about this sad rejection of the usual social rituals. The old ladies shake their heads in incomprehension. Orietta worries that if the point of a discarded syringe should pierce the sole of her shoes, it could give her AIDS. But Giampaolo knows that the virus only lives for fifteen minutes outside the body. And we’re back on safe ground discussing the reliability of the information they give us and whether the state should bow to Vatican pressure not to advise people to use condoms.

  We trek on. The land, like that around Rivoli, is semi-abandoned. Elaborate stone terracing, now overgrown and ill-kept, reminds you that only fifteen, twenty years ago these hills were worked intensively. But not even the expensive blandishments of the Common Agricultural
Policy have been able to keep the peasants at work up here. Now the only productive aspect of the landscape is the olive trees, their fantastically gnarled fairy-tale trunks and curious leaves, at once dull green and bright silver, adding a further touch of magic to the landscape, an autumnal play of stark, twisted, southern evergreen against paling breaks of deciduous copse. More prosaically, whenever the contours allow for it, there will be a long low prefab factory farm for chickens or churkeys. Approaching, you hear the sinister hum of electrics, then a busy clucking that explodes into excitement, or protest perhaps, as the birds sense your passing.

  A couple of hours later, having reached the top of the ridge above the village, the whole fantastic landscape to the north opens up before us. Range after range of hills rise one after another to blue mountains. The panorama is vast, hugely open, intensely exhilarating. We stop and gaze. Two rapid reports from a shot-gun, then two more tell us hunters are about, although we have seen not a single wild animal along the walk, heard not a rustle. Bang bang, go the guns. Presumably aimed at some fluttering uccellino. Poveretto, says Vittorina, who enjoys cooking them so much. And, having absorbed the view, we press on toward the little village of Cancello.

  When Lucilla retired she sold her cleaning company to a bigger one, but Marisa and husband Leone still work on in a management role. With the decent incomes these two no doubt deserve they have built themselves a house up on the hills. They would have liked to be nearer Montecchio but, unusually for Italians, they chose not to accept the offer of the flat immediately below Lucilla’s. It is to this perversity that the Visentini owe their good fortune in occupying Flat 2.

  At first sight, Marisa and Leone’s villetta looks like an English bungalow, for local zoning forbade them to build over a certain height. However the attic is abitabile – liveable – and opens on to a most attractive terrace cut in the roof. The ground floor is spacious and luxurious: tiles, parquet, rugs, two bathrooms, three bedrooms. But this wasn’t enough for Marisa and Leone. Unable to build upwards, they decided to go down. The hills are limestone and easily cut. So there is a basement dug into the rock, comprising a garage for the Mercedes and then a huge taverna with absolutely all mod cons: TV, well-stocked bar, second dishwasher, fireplace of medieval castle proportions (including spit), etc. etc. And still it wasn’t enough. For below that again, two floors beneath the rosemary, chives and minty grass of the hillside above, is the cellar. With bare rock walls, it is clammy, cool and abundantly stocked with wines labelled and labelless, alongside a variety of hams, salamis and sausages suspended from hooks in the ceiling.