Italian Neighbors

by Tim Parks

  Stiff Giampaolo is most impressed by it all. Validissimo, this idea of a second basement beneath the first. The temperature is just perfect. And the wine selection is certainly discreto. Whatever the inevitable ‘relativity’ of the situation may be, he chooses not to mention it in deference to our host.

  We climb back up to the taverna. In bright and fashionable halogen lighting hidden in the false ceiling over the bar, I find myself surrounded by antlers, boars’ heads, stuffed grouse and the like. And fleetingly I wonder what the same kind of people in England would aspire to. Perhaps the sort of showhouse I blundered into in South Wales on holiday last year: a simplified, wood-frame copy of some grand Victorian original, with twee furnishings, imitation Laura Ashley curtains, glass-covered bookshelves boasting leatherbound editions (surely fake) of Shakespeare and Dickens, and very sophisticated naughty underwear laid out on the pink silk lookalike counterpane in the masterbedroom.

  But Leone and Marisa do nothing to hide their humble origins. They speak a broad dialect which I can’t always follow. They have no cultural pretensions. If the floor is paved with a warm red cotto, it is because they like it. Likewise the designer tiles in the bathroom. They happen to like them. They have the money. And they are incorrigibly jolly as they serve us the usual abundant Sunday lunch of a pasta dish (al pesto), followed by various boiled meats and fatty red, quite delicious cotechino with polenta and salad. Then the inevitable tiramisù. And cheeses. A piece of Parmesan to sweeten the mouth? A piece of seasoned Piave? Or would you like some sheep’s cheese? And now fruit of course: uva moscata, kiwis …

  We are sitting around a table designed for thirty odd. There are photographs of big parties on the wall. But Leone’s booming voice and merry stories make up for the lack of numbers. The wines come and go in the usual sequence, as they must: a Bardolino novello for the aperitivo, sharp and fresh from the vines, a smooth Barbera to bring out the flavour of the meat, a blood-red sickly Recioto for the sweet. And now a glass of grappa appears beside your coffee. There’s giggling, backslapping. Even Vittorina is light-hearted, despite, at one point, some low-voiced conversation with Marisa about a Madonna who has been seen to cry recently in a church at Colognola Veneta. ‘What about some chestnuts,’ booms the incorrigible Leone. ‘Chestnuts, chestnuts.’ He’s gathered them himself in some wood further north. Italians have always been off gathering or picking something for themselves. The chestnuts are placed over the grate on a sort of frying pan with holes, then wrapped in cloth in a basket and handed round. No salt. That would push the pressure up terribly. But another cork is pulled. It’s all hugely pleasant and at the same time far far far too much.

  ‘Troppo, troppo gentile,’ Lucilla says at the door, appearing to forget that this is the girl she brought up as her daughter. Troppo gentile. Buxom Marisa in Sunday best winks at the others. Leone goes down to get the Mercedes.

  But surprisingly, the seventy-year-old ladies are all for walking back. They don’t want to be taken in the car. So we set out mid-afternoon in an atmosphere of dazed merriment and with a great deal of extra ballast to work off.

  There is a lot more traffic about now as people return from their Sunday lunch in the surrounding trattorias. But not everybody is going straight back to Verona. Here and there, as we cross the road to follow the path, we find cars have pulled off the tarmac to park in the fields, and, while mother and children walk about looking for mushrooms, flowers and herbs, papà sits in the driving seat listening to the radio and nervously cracking his knuckles. Or alternatively, papà does go off walking with his wife and children, but all the while holding a tiny transistor to his ear, cracking his knuckles against his thighs. An elderly and very well-to-do couple stroll by: distinguished, snooty almost, arm in formal arm, mohair coats, traditional hats. But the man has his trannie at his ear. And he is biting the corner of his lips.

  They are listening to the local football game. Across fields and slopes, it comes from behind, in front, above, below you – the sound of a nasal voice commentating play with the very same pomposity Lara is presumably supposed to bring to La verità nella filosofia, nella matematica e nella fisica. I overhear something like: ‘The dynamic oscillation of mid-field deployment with interchangeable roles in zone configuration is indubitably sound when considered from an exclusively tactical perspective, but perhaps the precariously semi-advanced position of the two centre backs which this inevitably entails is not entirely suitable to the psychological tension in which players understandably though, it must be agreed, regrettably, approach a game that could prove the watershed of this intriguing championship.’ It’s bewildering and I for one certainly haven’t the faintest idea what it means. But people are listening intently enough. After all, this is the place where the choice of referees for next week’s games is announced together with political scandals and spiralling national debt on TV news headlines. The little radios hiss and crackle between the olives. Sunday afternoon. Verona are losing. Faces are long and severe.

  We press on. Then, in the twilight of this beautiful day, hurrying down the hill paths, Lucilla begins to sing. She sings a sickly hymn tune: Tu scendi dalle stelle, o re del cie-e-elo! Then, more merrily, a grating old pop tune: Ciao ciao bambina, un bacio ancora … She is very loud, with a cracked, witch’s voice, and completely tone deaf. The others join in, if only to drown out Lucilla. Then Rita and Giampaolo launch into some of the famous songs of the Alpini, the Italian mountain regiment. They are all First World War songs from when the regiment won a notable victory, turning back the Germans in the mountains with very great loss of life. There’s a sort of spirited mournfulness to tune and words that reminds me of traditional Welsh singing. And the occasional refrain tells all: ‘That long train that went to the frontier …’; ‘On the bridge at Bassano, we’ll hold hands’; ‘Don’t get yourself killed, soldier’; ‘They are shelling Cortina’; ‘Ta-pum, ta-pum, ta-pum’.

  Italian friends tell me these old songs are corny, and yet I always find them desperately moving: the young men marching into the mountains, ill-equipped, to death and glory, for undoubtedly a certain sad glory there is to be had in such situations: ‘But if I fall amongst flowers,’ they sing, ‘I don’t care if I die.’ ‘Ta-pum, ta-pum,’ go the guns. It always brings tears to my eyes. I must be hopelessly sentimental. And I can’t listen any more. So I fall back a few paces to walk beside Orietta, who immediately asks me if I think it’s wise of them to let Lara do so much volleyball. She’s such a big girl already. Isn’t there a danger she might get thick ankles, muscular legs …

  We’re still walking when night falls, although Montecchio isn’t far below us now, the castle sharp against the glow of Verona behind. The radios have fallen silent. Ghostly among the hills, long thin lines of light flicker on. For the chickens its always fluorescent daytime. They produce more. I take Lucilla’s arm as we negotiate our way along the last stretch of dirt track. She tucks my hand tight under her elbow. And so back home, after what must surely have been our most successful day as a condominium.

  To hear, through the fence, from a hovering Lovato, the momentous news that il professore’s wife, Maria Rosa died today. During our scampagnata. The battle for the inheritance of Via Colombare 10, Flat 4, opens in earnest.

  l8

  Un panino due …

  MY FIRST MONTHS at Via Colombare I bought my bread at Tosi’s, a shop which is little more than a hole in the wall but still manages to sell every possible foodstuff in just ten square metres. There’s a cash desk at the door, the wooden shelving is chock-a-block, the floor is made of old stone conglomerate, the cheapest, and, behind a cluttered deli at the back, old Tosi himself, bald head threatened by salamis above, cuts squares of pizza in the half dark and counts out bread rolls from bins. He always counts them out aloud. ‘Otto mantovane, per favore’, you say, and he begins: ‘Un panino, due panini, tre panini, quattro panini …’ Before we learn his name, we always refer to him as ‘Un panino due’.

  When he’s tucked your r
olls into a brown paper bag, this lean old man scribbles something with a practised shopkeeper’s smile and you turn to the wife at the desk to pay. They don’t have a proper electronic till, which means they’re declaring a very low turnover, since above something fairly pathetic VAT-approved cash registers have recently become obligatory. The signora doesn’t have a head for sums and invariably gives you less change than she should. Meanwhile, Tosi is already counting out the next customer’s rolls: ‘Un panino, due panini …’ He has recently built a small estate of four palazzine, sixteen flats in all, opposite the petrol pump. They go for more than a million a square metre. A fortune. On the hill behind us he is building two much larger villas surrounded by elaborate iron fences for himself and his family. Rumour has it that in the hungrier years of the war he would give people bread in return for land. Certainly he now owns large areas of hillside, and is eagerly courted by the local building contractors. But for all his wealth, however gained, old Tosi continues to count out panini: un panino, due panini … And you say to his wife, ‘Mi scusi, Signora Tosi, you haven’t given me enough change.’ ‘O davvero?’ she says. ‘I am sorry.’

  So when Bepi expands his greengrocery, adding a bread and deli counter, I’m happy to switch there. Which means I walk past Tosi’s shop now, my plastic bag in my hand. Perhaps the old man has come out of his cave for a moment to stand on the steps beside the ancient enamelled blue sign that says, ‘OLIO D’OLIVA. OLIO DI SEMI, ZUC-CHERO …’ He has a soiled white shopkeeper’s coat, arms folded. And to show that my betrayal is of no concern, he makes a point of smiling his scrubbed shopkeeper’s smile from around a long hooked nose. For his old customers will never betray him. Old Marini and his wife will never betray him, never go to a shop run by a parvenu like Bepi. Lucilla and Vittorina will never betray him. They’re in there. Despite the fact that everything is more expensive. Troppo gentile, troppo gentile, Lucilla says to Signora Tosi, not counting her change at the door.

  Bepi is sorting through piles of paper as he takes your money at the till. Scores and scores of loose scraps of paper: green paper, yellow paper, blue paper, printed, typed, scribbled. ‘What are they?’ I ask him. ‘Scartoffie,’ he says: rubbish. And he laughs his barrel-chested laugh. In fact, they are all delivery notes and invoices from suppliers: a farmer who brings goat’s cheeses in jars of oil, an importer who sends him Swedish salmon, a processor who prepares olives and red peppers, again in oil. It’s a serious deli.

  Bepi has a blunt pencil behind his ear in thick hair. I ask him if he does his accounts himself. He says yes. I ask him how he can possibly manage this with his gym, his karate, his dogs, his court cases, his occult studies, the house he is renovating. Of course he can’t, he says. But then if he can’t, they certainly never will, will they? We both know who ‘they’ are. ‘And if they bother you?’ ‘I’ll prosecute them’, he says, ‘for harassment.’ And he means it.

  Rather than giving you too little change, Bepi usually rounds your bill down. ‘Five thousand two hundred and fifty? Oh, just give me five thousand.’ He has an electronic till, but doesn’t always open it. After all, I’m a friend. The government, one might mention, agreed to pay shopkeepers a percentage of the cost of introducing approved electronic tills. Mainly produced by Olivetti.

  Mopeds whizz round the bend in the road as I leave the shop. One towing a bicycle. Outside Tosi’s shop there are now four or five youngsters sitting on the steps behind their bikes eating oily squares of pizza out of sheets of paper. I walk to the other end of the village to pick up my Arena, and outside the newsagents there are other youths perched on more mopeds; these ones drinking Coca-Cola and eating crisps. Moreno, the tiny halfwit in deerstalker cap, is trying to talk to them and they are gently making fun. Going past the church there are yet more youths, yet more mopeds, hanging around in the gardens there. They hang around till late in the evening, summer or winter. Generally they are well behaved, I don’t get the impression they booze at all, but occasionally a phone box, the phone box, will get damaged – or a road sign. And they catch colds, of course. Because it’s mid-October now.

  Giampaolo protests at the first local council meeting I go to. Kids are hanging around all over the place vandalising things and freezing their feet because there are no facilities in Montecchio, no green spaces and nothing for people to do. Actually, Giampaolo is not really very worried about this, since for the moment his daughter always returns at a reasonable hour; but word has got about that the cherry orchard behind the Madonnina at the end of Via Colombare is not to become a public park and recreation area, as originally promised in the plan for the village, but a cooperative housing estate. Which will mean tripling the traffic along our narrow street.

  Giampaolo is well spoken, polite, but forthright. A modern, liberal man. There are cries of ‘Sì giustissimo!’ But the Christian Democrat leader in Montecchio, who is also the weasely fellow in charge of the post office, calmly dismisses him. There is volleyball some evenings in the school gym, and the church lays on meetings for young people one or two nights a week. The reason kids are out on the street vandalising things is because they are not being brought up with traditional Christian values in good strong families (murmurings of approval from the older contingent). And it is calumny, he says, to suggest that the Party is in the pockets of the building contractors.

  The Christian Democrats’ local office is in an old church on one of the main corners in the village. They poll around 70 per cent of the Montecchio vote. The Veneto in general has a higher Christian Democrat vote than anywhere in Italy, including Sicily. The old church has a small tree growing on its unkept roof. Below, on the grey wall above the flood overflow ditch which runs alongside, someone has spray-painted: ‘FOREIGNERS OUT OF THE VENETO.’

  Only two hundred metres away, the Communist Party headquarters is a dark, poky place on the main street opposite Pasticceria Maggia. On a hand-painted wooden board above the door, the hammer and sickle are fading fast. Through the window, old men can be glimpsed at a bare wooden table on which stands a labelless two-litre bottle of wine.

  The very same men are also to be seen some mornings sitting under straw hats on a bedraggled couch under a fig tree against the sagging wire fence that surrounds their allotments. The two-litre bottle, however, from behind which they look out over lines of enormous cabbages, is doubtless a fresh one. Youths roar by on their mopeds, confabulate in knots at street corners. After dark, when their parents could not see even if they drove right by, they kiss.

  A modest crop of unmarried mothers patrols the streets with their baby carriages, and in general have the sympathy of the population.

  The very attractive barista in Pasticceria Maggia is such a case. Her child is eight years old, and perhaps aptly called Luna. The barista serves the people coming out of church. Out of church and into the bar in their Sunday best, which means furs for the women now the cooler air gives them an excuse. There’s a parade feeling about it all. From one institution to another: the host, the brioche.

  The church has the largest car park in the village, aside from the supermarket’s, which nobody uses. A capacity of around a hundred cars. It is full Saturday evening for the Mass for those who want to dash off skiing first thing Sunday morning, or those who’ll be so long in the discothèque tonight they don’t expect to make it tomorrow. And it is full again Sunday morning for the Mass for those who want to show off clothes and well-dressed children and get a cappuccino afterwards in the bar and buy attractively wrapped trays of pastries for visits to relatives. Some of these people drive from three or four hundred metres away.

  The church car park is also full for funerals and weddings. A bride and groom come out. They have married in their late twenties after being boyfriend and girlfriend since puberty. A photographer is waiting on the steps. But the groom is already lighting a cigarette. Anyway, the real photos will be taken later in an ornamental park the other side of Verona where there is a lake and stone nymphs. The photographer will fade one face
over the other against a pre-prepared full moon behind floating in the water. For the moment though, everyone is rushing out of church to try and get their cars out of the car-park before the crush. Since it’s a wedding, they all honk.

  Yes, it was certainly wise of the local government to provide such ample parking space, such a large area of asphalt in the middle of the village. But when there are first communions to be celebrated, even this space is unable to contain the flood of traffic and enthusiasm. The cars tuck in by the emergency overflow dike and down the embankment as far as the supermarket. The spiffily dressed relatives step out of black BMWs. Clean, per bene, as they say here: healthy, wealthy, right-thinking people. There is something almost Victorian about the overdressed children, the fussing mothers. Certainly they all know their catechism well enough, as one child after another is accepted into the community. And after the ceremony’s over, it’s off to a restaurant where a table has been reserved for twenty. The expensive festivities will go on all afternoon and the children will be given their golden chains and crucifixes and signet rings.

  On his election poster, the local Christian Democrat uses a picture of himself and his wife standing with family and friends around a beautifully laid table with white embroidered tablecloth, tall glasses of bubbly, large slices of panettone. There is no message or slogan, just the candidate’s name; but we can feel reasonably sure that this man supports all the best local aspirations, is the very avant-garde of the bourgeoisie perhaps.