Italian Neighbours_An Englishman in Verona

by Tim Parks

  Silence. Surprise. Then Lucilla was saying, ‘Grazie Gesù, grazie!’ Behind her back, after swiftly making the sign of the cross, her hands seemed to be trying to loosen off some girdle or brassiere. Her face was purple: ‘Maria Santissima, grazie!’ The key had broken. We couldn’t get in. It was a sign from God. It was proof of her claim to ownership. She was weeping for joy. Signora Marta led us in a hasty retreat down the stairs. As we drove away the onlookers were already converging on the house for news of how the battle had gone.

  2

  Iella

  OVER ESPRESSO IN a bar back in Verona, Signora Marta endeavoured to reassure us. That ignorant old witch had run the cleaning company for which Marta’s uncle – Patuzzi – had done the accounts. When the company was sold off, Lucilla, her brother Giosuè and sister-in-law Vittorina had built the palazzina in Via Colombare together with Patuzzi so that they could all retire happily together. Lucilla’s daughter had been supposed to move into the fourth flat but hadn’t wanted to be near her mother. Signora Marta pouted thin lips and tapped a city nose, as if to say, ‘and we know why, don’t we?’ In any event, Lucilla had somehow got it into her head that the whole palazzina had been built with her money, that is the company’s money, and that all flats would revert to her or her heirs on the death of the occupant. ‘Can you imagine anything so crazy?’ Uncle Patuzzi had died a year ago. His wife, Anna Rosa, Marta’s aunt, had hung on in the flat a year longer, but was ill, infirm and constantly harangued by an ever more threatening Lucilla with whom she had never andata d’accordo, being herself from an altogether different social class. Now the old lady, poveretta, had gone into a home, mainly to escape Lucilla, and she, Signora Marta, as future heir and present administrator, needed to make some money out of the place, if only, as we would surely appreciate, to pay the various bills and taxes. No sooner were we actually in the flat than Lucilla would accept the situation, this afternoon’s outburst being anyway mainly due to this abysmal weather which could play havoc with anyone’s nerves.

  Well, Rita and I had spent most of our life together looking for rented accommodation. We had searched twice in Boston, three times in London, and this was our second time in Italy. We knew that finding a place is tough and that the more generous and idealistic the tenancy laws are, the tougher it becomes. Italy’s laws are idealistic in the extreme, with a sort of permanent freeze on evictions, since no political party seems ready to face the flak of unfreezing the situation (the same might be said of almost every area of Italian politics). What’s more, we had no place to stay. So it was agreed that no sooner had the locksmith done his job – and Signora Marta had a friend who had another friend who knew something about locks – than we would try again under cover of darkness.

  Thus it was. Poor Lucilla must have been in bed, or deafened by her television. Signora Marta had her keys carefully labelled. Barely a minute after the cars had been parked, their doors clicked quietly shut, we were already tiptoeing into the flat. Under a 40-watt bulb, Marta made us sign something on the kitchen table; to the effect that we promised to leave in exactly one year’s time or at any moment thereafter when she should so desire. Of course, such a contract could have no legal validity since wise Signora Marta had no intention of declaring us as tenants and getting caught for tax on her rent. But as you discover after a while, Italians lay great store by the signing of pieces of paper, ‘documenti’ they insist on calling them. There is a certain ritual attached to the practice, a warding off of evil spirits, and an appeal to the notion of honour which, people feel, should take precedence over legal quibbling, if only because it is generally more convenient to keep the government out of things.

  Satisfied, but still nervous, Signora Marta gathered up her piece of paper. Here was the bank account number to pay the rent to: at the Banca Popolare di Verona in Piazza Nogara. Three hundred thousand Lire. Apparently, she didn’t have time to show us the place. If we had any problems finding anything we could call her on the phone. The furnishings, she could guarantee – and she made the gesture of someone in a hurry – were excellent. Her uncle and aunt had been people of considerable culture, well educated, much travelled. We would find books and art works that were estremamente interessanti. If there was anything left in the drawers or cupboards we could store it in the solaio, the loft, upstairs. The key was on the bunch. ‘Va bene?’ This thin, nervous woman took more than a cursory look through the Judas hole in the door, drew a deep breath, whispered arrivederci and scuttled off down the stairs.

  So far we had barely looked about us. Now we explored. And discovered that none of the light bulbs in the flat were any more than 40 watts, so that even the grotesque five-armed chandelier in the salotto dripping with globules of smoky glass cast only a dim glow of sad pomp. For such a cultured man Uncle Patuzzi had been doing remarkably little reading of an evening.

  Still, minor shortcomings of this variety could easily be remedied, we thought. Likewise the array of department store Madonnas, Sacred Hearts, Sant’Antonios and clumsy bric-à-brac crucifixions that stared down from every wall could be removed and stored away with minimum effort. And the orange-and-green floor tiles did have a smooth, clean, cool feel to them; the window fittingswere, by London standards, quite luxurious, while the bathroom, with walls tiled almost to the ceiling, hardwood loo seat and handsome creamy beige bidet and bath, was palatial. Certainly, when one remembered the bedsits and miniflats of Acton and Willesden, this was a very well-appointed place indeed.

  But the furniture … Well, we had seen it elsewhere, so it was not entirely unexpected. But depressing all the same. So many Italians, even young Italians, will move into the most modern buildings, light and airy with attractive ceramics and fittings, only to clutter the space with heavy coffin-quality furniture which affects the antique and noble but achieves only the cumbersome and uncleanable, casting sad shadows into the bargain. Thus, a dark-stained console with twisting candlestick legs was shedding neat piles of sawdust to let us know the woodworm were at work. Veneer was blistering on a mammoth bookcase with surely anachronous frosted glass doors, while above the sofa a teak-framed mirror with cracked silvering found 40-watt reflections of a darkly noble dinner-table opposite. Venturing as far as the bedroom, and rather disconcerted now, we found great, square, black-varnished head– and footboards supporting a sagging boat shape between, reminiscent of the bed in a school-of-Veronese Death of the Virgin I had recently seen in a local church. On opening dusty chests, dark wardrobes, deep drawers, we discovered that all without exception were full to overflowing with the worn-out possessions of thirty years ago.

  In need of air, we rolled up plastic slat shutters and walked out on to the main terrace balcony into the luminous, breathless heat of the evening. Across the street, in front of an older peasant house with fine pink stucco, a group of people our own age were laughing, drinking, smoking and playing table tennis under a fluorescent tube whirring with moths, strung up between two tall cypresses. In the street, despite the hour, their numerous children kicked a football amongst the cars, including our own, bicycles still on top, strips of chrome hanging off the sides. We sat on the arms of an old armchair that Uncle or Aunty Patuzzi had abandoned out here to make a home for spiders and provide the stuff of birds’ nests. The sharp tock-tocking of the ping-pong ball, the laughter of adults and children, the background whirring of crickets, was not unpleasant. And would have been pleasanter still with a glass of chilled white wine in our hands. That was something to look forward to. Walking to the far end of the balcony, we saw a young man manoeuvring his sober blue Lancia into a makeshift garage of corrugated iron and breeze block. Then came the strains of the news programme from perhaps three or four open windows. What time was it, eleven o’clock? At midnight we could expect the first fresh stirring of the air. And we intended to be naked on the bed for that.

  This has always been one of the pleasures of high summer here. You have been uncomfortably sticky all day. Maybe you’ve showered twice, tried shorts, lo
ng cotton trousers, T-shirts, tank tops, exchanged shoes for tennis shoes, tennis shoes for sandals, sandals for bare feet, had the fan on top speed blowing your papers about while you’re typing, sucked ice cubes, put your legs in a bucket of cold water, etc., etc., and nothing has worked. The heat seems to come from inside you. Comfort is unimaginable.

  Naturally, you feel irritable. Towards evening, you look at the sky, listen to distant thunder, watch the heat lightning playing over low hills, and you know that it won’t rain; so often the elements put on this show just to tease. Going to bed you must decide: the open windows and the zanzare, the mosquitoes, or the closed windows and the heat. Inevitably, you opt for the mosquitoes, because in the end, at least around Verona, there aren’t that many.

  You lie there naked. The idea of any superfluous contact with your body in the form of a sheet or pyjamas is unthinkable. Through a kind of breathy intimacy the summer darkness has, you listen to chatter, facetious variety shows, card games and music from other open windows; because nobody in the entire neighbourhood is asleep, nobody would dream of installing air-conditioning so as to be able to turn in at the normal time (and even mosquito nets are rare). Everybody is waiting for it to happen. Until at last, around midnight or shortly afterwards, like some good spirit suddenly moving across the face of the earth, or the touch of a lover’s finger dipped in cool water, the air stirs, it shifts, it breathes, and the notion of freshness becomes imaginable again. Almost immediately the sounds fade, the TVs snap off, the children cease to shriek and chatter, Via Colombare is falling asleep.

  It was an hour or so later on this particular night that Vega began to bark. I am not exaggerating when I say of Vega that I have never heard another dog sound so deeply disturbed, so much an anima in pena, a tormented soul. She bayed, wailed, was at once furious and desperate. I remember asking Rita which circle of the Inferno we might be in.

  The third or fourth time the beast woke up, I went out on to the tiny balcony of our bedroom at the back of the house away from the street. On a raised terrace not five yards away, the other side of a narrow canyon of garden between, a big golden labrador strained a long chain to paw at flaking shutters barring the back door of an old peasant house. It howled rather than barked, perhaps moaned rather than howled. And as I watched, enjoying the now cool night air on my skin, somebody threw something at the creature from an upper window, food perhaps, for the dog was immediately scrabbling excitedly among the terrace sweepings between a Cinquecento and an Alfetta.

  Back in bed, the apparent relief of silence was shortlived. The insidious whine of a zanzara hovered just above our pillows. Up in a flash, light on, a dusty accountancy magazine of Patuzzi’s grabbed from the bedside table, within a minute I’d reduced the thing to a bright red spot of blood on the greying tempera wall. ‘Can AIDS be passed on by mosquitoes?’ the local paper had recently been alarming us.

  ‘I wonder, you know,’ I asked, coming back to bed, ‘I wonder if the yups and artsy guys and retired professors checking through estate agents’ lists of farmhouses in Tuscany have been adequately filled in on these details.’ My wife, who always seems ready for questions of this kind, remarked that first the weather was never this unpleasantly sultry in Tuscany, second that local dialects there were all more or less comprehensible, since they formed the basis of modern Italian, and third, and most convincingly, that anybody who could afford to buy a farmhouse in Tuscany need not have somebody else’s hunting dog breathing down their necks, and would doubtless have screen windows fitted before moving in. As far as we were concerned, however, she continued, there was just the small problem that we were not so fortunately placed vis-à-vis our bank accounts and, furthermore, that there were so many Brits in Tuscany that our linguistic skills would not be in the kind of demand that might allow us to pay a hefty rent.

  ‘Plus the fact’, she added, ‘che tu porti iella. You bring bad luck.’

  Only months later, when I took the liberty of saying the same thing to a business acquaintance, did I appreciate that such an accusation is one of the worst things an Italian can say to somebody. Had I known, we would doubtless have argued long into the night.

  3

  Pasticceria Maggia

  AM I GIVING the impression that I don’t like the Veneto? It’s not true. I love it. I’m going to tell you some wonderful things about it. When I’ve finished, I hope you’ll be wishing you’d been here too, at least for a little while. But like any place that’s become home, I hate it too. And, of course, you can’t separate the things you love and hate: you can’t say, let’s move to so and so where they have the cappuccini, the wines, the lasagna, the marvellous peaches, the handsome people in handsome clothes, the fine buildings, the close-knit, friendly secretiveness of village life, but not, please, the howling maltreated hunting dogs, the spoilt adolescents on their motorini, the hopeless postal service, the afa. You can’t do it. It’s a package deal.

  In any event, the morning after our unnerving arrival, we set off to find the village bar/pasticceria and console ourselves with the pleasanter side of the arrangement, make ourselves known, see the lie of the land. And for anyone moving to Italy, this is a habit I really can’t recommend too warmly: frequent your local bar, and if possible bar/pasticceria; frequent it assiduously, decorously, even religiously.

  Timing is important. In general, if you want to order a cappuccino with brioche you should try to arrive before ten-thirty. Of course, you could still order the same things later, but this would be a declaration of your foreignness. And while Italians usually seem to like foreigners, the foreigners they like most are the ones who know the score, the ones who have caved in and agreed that the Italian way of doing things is the best. For this is a proud and profoundly conservative people, as careful observation of ordering at the bar will confirm. And a tightly knit one too. How is it that they all instinctively sense, without even glancing at stylish watches, that such and such a time is the moment to switch to their aperitivi? How they chuckle and grin when a German orders a cappuccino rather than an espresso after lunch, pouring that milk on to an already full stomach. And here’s a curious detail: espresso is always OK, twenty-four hours a day, even corretto (i.e., with grappa), but cappuccino has a very definite time slot: 8–10.30 a.m. Trivia? No, good training. When the full complexity of these nuances becomes apparent – because the digestivo, the gingerino, the prosecco all have their right times and contexts too – you will be less surprised by the labyrinthine process of, say, switching your driving licence to an Italian one or sorting out your position vis-à-vis the health system. There is an order to all things; follow it, even when it borders on the superstitious and ritualistic.

  Warning. If the first sip of your cappuccino tells you that long-life milk is being used, change bar before you have invested too much time there. Use of UHT milk (all too frequent alas) indicates that either you are far far out in the sticks where the urbane delights of the cappuccino have never really been understood, or that this is a bar where most people (men) are ordering grappa or wine, or if they are ordering coffee are putting grappa and wine in it, not milk. A typical confirmation that you are in this variety of bar might be that the barista replies to your Italian, whether competent or hesitant, in defiantly incomprehensible dialect, quite probably revealing that dental work and oral hygiene are not high on the list of personal priorities. No matter how characteristic you may find this UHT bar, how picturesque its old wooden chairs, dusty pergola, sports trophies, sentimental paintings hung askew, and weather-beaten old characters arguing volubly over games of briscola, the fact is that, ultimately, you have no business here, you will never be accepted however many times you come. You are only making these doubtless very wholesome people feel slightly uncomfortable.

  Another scene which is definitely to be avoided is the bar where you are invited first to pay at the till, then present your receipt to the, in this case smartly dressed, even uniformed barista behind his polished pink granite bar under a row of fa
shionable halogen lights. Reasons? First because this is probably a bar where if you want to sit down you will have to pay for waiter service, and hence, having picked up your coffee and taken it to your seat, you will be scolded, perhaps quite severely, and invited to pay a surcharge. Payment for seating is of course perfectly understandable in the busy city centre, but not really on if you plan to be in that bar as frequently as I’m suggesting. But the second and more important reason is because this is not the sort of bar where the same people come and relax every day and can thus, as weeks and months pass by, be placed and identified and become part of your life. No, this is a busy bar. A business bar. A tourist bar. And we are not interested in any of those.

  I cannot claim to being widely travelled, but I have lived in London, Cambridge, Boston, spent fairly long periods in Switzerland, in New York, holidayed in most of Western Europe. You can draw your own conclusions. In any event, I’m now going to stick my neck out and say that I honestly know of nowhere, nowhere, where the whole experience of ordering and consuming coffee and a pastry is, or could be, more pleasant than in Pasticceria Maggia, Piazza Buccari, Montecchio. And we selected it from five or six other candidates that very first Sunday. Obviously, we had a nose for these things by now.

  You enter through a glass door polished only seconds before you arrived, display windows to either side frothing with colourful goodies, since Italians will always favour the most extravagant packages, however miserly the contents, and are always ready to renew their long love affair with crinkly Cellophane and foil, ribbons, bows and tinsel flourishes of every kind. Opposite you, as you adjust to a pleasant but not excessive dimming of light, is a long bar with attractive curved corner, polished wood to the front and yellow travertine on top. Behind and above is the typical array of bottles, mainly amari, digestivi, distillations of this and that (artichokes, rhubarb), things you have never heard of and most probably will never learn to like; to the left is the seating area, just a handful of tables, to the right a great glass counter with four tiers of small and dainty biscuits, cakes and pastries.