by Tim Parks
But after five minutes Giampaolo again politely demanded to be served. The younger of the women, lavishly if not seductively made up, fashionably if not attractively dressed, said the man couldn’t possibly be much longer. Giampaolo asked where he was. The girl flustered. Nobody had registered a birth for a week or so, she said. And then they were so pushed still with the aftermath of the elections. Surely we could understand that? But if we were really in a hurry then she would try to handle the matter herself. Her voice echoed petulantly in the big room, designed, presumably, for nobler purposes. A great chandelier gathered dust above a VDU. The lighting was fluorescent.
We were in a hurry, Giampaolo said. We had come early because he had to get to work. People noticed, he remarked pointedly, when he was absent.
The girl, clearly resentful of the fact that her colleague hadn’t budged, came over to the counter, pulled a huge book out from a drawer beneath and asked us for our documents: Giampaolo’s, Orietta’s, my own. But when she saw the British passport she shook her head. Was I the father? She couldn’t possibly take it upon herself to register a foreigner’s birth. And she turned to the older woman: ‘Do we have any special conventions with England?’ The other didn’t know. I suggested that the conventions would be the same as for all EC countries. ‘Is England a member of the EC?’ the girl asked her colleague. ‘Credo di sì,’ came a monotone response. But the girl shook her head all the same. We would just have to wait for il responsabile.
‘But where is he?’ Giampaolo returned to the offensive. ‘We have no intention of waiting here all morning.’
The girl looked to the woman behind for support. This dusty creature said sourly: ‘Running an errand at the hospital.’ And she wouldn’t look up from her keyboard.
‘Ring him up.’
My neighbour, I was discovering, had the disturbingly professional belligerence of somebody who not only knows when to pick a fight but is also perfectly confident of how he is going to go about winning it.
The two hesitated.
Giampaolo announced: ‘This is a public service. The office is obliged to have somebody present who can register births. It is now officially open. You have admitted the man is not ill. At this point I am left with no alternative but to sporgere una denuncia’ (i.e., report the matter to the police).
We had only been waiting ten minutes. It seemed perfectly normal to me.
‘Giampaolo!’ Orietta protested sotto voce.
Turning to us, the usually wooden Giampaolo grinned broadly and whispered: ‘The man’s in the bar. You’ll see. He’s having his breakfast.’
At the word ‘denuncia’ the two women, rather than protesting or growing more hostile, had begun to confabulate quite urgently under the cover of their computer printer. After a moment they pulled out the phone book and began to leaf quickly through.
‘They’d have the number to the hospital written down’, Giampaolo whispered. I was all admiration.
The girl picked up the phone, dialled, asked if Lucio was there, hung on. And then the obvious occurred to me. ‘It’s because the pasticceria at this side of the village is closed. He’s had to go to the one opposite the hospital and it’s taking him longer than it usually does.’
And, indeed, just five minutes later Lucio could be heard hurrying up the stairs, icing sugar on the bristles of a fine moustache. ‘Bene, Signori, vediamo.’ He smiled broadly, rubbed his hands together, and scribbled down my passport number as if he saw a dozen a day. To my relief the delay was not mentioned. Everybody was extremely polite and friendly and we all wished each other buon giorno. But Giampaolo, walking down to the car, was gloating. If there’s one thing an impotent dipendente can do, it’s demand his rights from a statale. Such was the world into which my child had now been officially introduced.
37
Manifesti funebri
SO MUCH GETS said about the inefficiency of Italian public services that I feel it my duty toward the end of this book to remark on how extraordinarily fast, even in the holiday season, the Gas, Water and Cemeteries Board (AGSM) will authorise a death notice. On every wall or space where ads and announcements are pasted up in the villages of the Veneto – behind the bus-stop, or higgledy-piggledy on a wall at a crossroads – you always find a couple of these simple manifesti funebri, giving their sad news. And from time to time, while picking up your newspaper or going for a haircut, you will turn a corner and see a familiar name. You know in Montecchio when your neighbours die. The cemetery encroaches on the shopping streets. Rightly so perhaps. And, while birth may be a frilly silk-blue or pink, death has no sex and, of course, only one colour. So you quickly learn to recognise the black borders and Christ’s upturned face with crown of thorns at the top in the centre. Across the middle of the poster there will be a name in large letters, and perhaps a nickname too, since nicknames are common in Italy (Dino Chiericatti, and beneath, ‘detto, il capitano’). The age is placed in brackets, likewise the married woman’s maiden name. There is the time and date of the funeral, gratitude in advance for those who attend. And a brief comment such as: ‘mourned by all her loved ones’, or ‘lost to the affection of family and friends’ – some appropriate, conventional formula, nothing fanciful. ‘Authorised by AGSM’, they have stamped askew in the bottom left-hand corner. The very day after Vittorina died the posters were already up all over the village.
Rita returned from the hospital just two days after Michele’s birth. In the meantime the old women had come back triumphantly sunburnt from their holiday and were fussing and clucking to see the child. We had barely laid the carrycot on the table before they were knocking on the door, bringing gifts in extravagant packages. They peeked under the covers, went into ecstasies: the first male child born on Via Colombare for heaven knows how long! A jinx had been broken! And again Lucilla made herself cry by recounting the story of her own little boy: the fever in the night, the hot poultices applied to quel povero corpicino. Again we said we were sure she had done everything that reasonably could be done. And I glanced up to check that I had written our paediatrician’s number on the board by the phone.
Giampaolo came upstairs. He didn’t want to disturb us. They would see the baby when we had all had time to settle down. He just wanted to let me know that I was released from my duties of watering and mowing the lawn for a little while. Then whenever we felt ready, we could pop the first of those bottles of prosecco together. He now had three in the back of the fridge.
The following afternoon, a day of stifling afa, Vittorina did not wake up from her siesta. Lucilla’s yells brought me running. Leone and Marisa were visiting and the three of them had discovered the corpse together. When I got downstairs, Lucilla had already recovered sufficiently to start pulling open drawers and thumbing through papers. It was intriguing that, for all the closeness of their friendship, Vittorina had never told her where she kept the will.
Leone lowered the shutters. Marisa lit a candle each side of the bed. I withdrew. On the threshold of her spick-and-span flat, its millimetrically positioned lithographs, and carefully dusted knick-knacks, Orietta had tears in her eyes. That low pressure at the seaside had been a terrible, terrible mistake. Criminal, on the doctor’s part. At which the culprit himself drew up in the road outside, a practised smile on his face as he stepped out of his Porsche. Troppo, ma troppo gentile, sobbed Lucilla. It occurred to me I had better remove the blue rosette from the door.
Today was Friday and the funeral couldn’t be arranged until Monday. With Giampaolo still at work, Orietta came upstairs around fivish to say she was worried about the possible smell. No, the undertakers didn’t take away the body here. The relatives had to pray over it until the funeral. They would put her in her coffin tomorrow, but the body would still be lying there until Monday and with this weather … Mightn’t it cause some kind of disease? After all, la poveretta was only just the other side of the wall from their own bed.
And the cassonetto with its rubbish was only the other side of the street.
Rita was trying to breastfeed the little baby. I couldn’t imagine there was any serious health risk, I said. But it wasn’t my field. Orietta, it appeared, had already consulted Giampaolo’s encyclopaedia. And now she stayed in our flat to phone various offices of the health service. There was a corpse just the other side of her bedroom wall. Could it cause disease? Their reassuring answers didn’t convince her. She would keep her windows tightly closed, however hot it got.
All Saturday and Sunday the people of Via Colombare trickled by to pay their respects to the deceased and offer condoglianze. Lucilla managed to be overdressed in mourning, bursting with energy and self-commiseration, playing the protagonist’s part. ‘Gradirebbe un gingerino, Signora Rosa, una tazza di tè?’ And yes, Vittorina had left the flat to her, although she didn’t want to talk about that kind of thing now. Word spread like wildfire. Bankworkers Antonio and Sabrina stopped by with Antonio’s father, all in black, although they had never known Vittorina.
It occurred to me that, with the flat downstairs to dispose of, the heat was probably off as far as we were concerned. And a baby is such an attraction.
Then on the Monday, perhaps a year and a month after we had arrived, I got to see another of Lucilla’s balcony performances. About twenty or thirty of us had gathered in the street, trying to keep out of the mud a bulldozer had left, for they had just begun to plough down the cherry trees behind the Madonnina. More work for our lady of the twig broom. Perhaps because of the heat, people were not overly formal. Only Lovato, who had presided so long over Vittorina’s gardening, had a suit and tie. Giampaolo had taken time off work and was smartly, although casually dressed. Faces were waxy with sweat. Don Guido arrived in his battered Renault, dents front, back and sides. There was subdued chatter, the bright whistle of a blind blackbird in the dusty morning air. Old Signora Marini whispered to me that we could come and get some figs when they were ripe. Black or green. She knew my wife liked figs. How was little Michele? Weight? Sleeping habits? Che caro!
The hearse turned the corner from the derelict factory end, its polished grey flanks bearing the sublimely comforting announcement: Azienda Municipale Servizi Funebri – another branch of AGSM. Men dressed in blue overalls went in beneath the Californian eaves of number 10 and lifted the coffin in the shuttered, candlelit room. They were careful with their feet on the polished marble. The ailing tropical plants were moved aside. Then out they came between the two dwarf cypresses that guarded the bourgeois spirit of the glass front door. In the street, one or two people stepped forward to place flowers on top but, as Vittorina had not been a Montecchiese by birth, it was not a big funeral. The hearse had long side windows cut specially low to make an elegant display of the polished wood. Don Guido had to slam his damaged car door twice.
And then, just as the hearse got into gear, just as the crowd was preparing to follow, Lucilla, with a perfect sense of timing, burst forth on her terrace balcony and began to shriek and tear her hair. She had been betrayed, betrayed, betrayed! By life, by death. Her only treasure had been taken from her. The only companion of her old age.
‘Vittorina, Vittorina, tesoro, cara, how could you? How could you die on me? Maria Santissima, oh Gesù, perchè, perchè?’ Curiously, there was at least as much anger as sorrow in the performance, as if her sister-in-law’s death wasn’t so very different from having been cheated out of il professore’s flat. Another loss, another encroachment. She bared her crooked teeth and howled, she pulled at her hair. Truly grief-stricken, and truly theatrical. She railed against God and spat. But this time one didn’t feel inclined to find anything cartoonlike or caricaturish about it, as one had a year ago. One was part of the crowd now, and one watched and listened respectfully, offering the tubby woman the audience she needed. One reflected that there would always be occasions, many occasions, even in the modern, high-tech, all-problems-solved world Giampaolo yearned for, when appearance on one’s balcony and a wild raw wail in stifling heat before a gathered crowd would be both understandable and appropriate.
Late that evening, we opened the first bottles of prosecco with the Visentini and wondered who our new neighbours would be. One bottle was flat. The second frothed splendidly. There was just no telling why. The moon, the pressure? ‘Salute! Health!’ Orietta was quick to say, clinking glasses. ‘Molto valido,’ I said taking my first sip. ‘Discreto,’ Giampaolo nodded, not wanting to go overboard. ‘But relativo,’ Rita added, ‘if only one bottle out of two is good.’ Sharp young Lara giggled.
Afterword
Some four or five years after I arrived in Italy, in a moment of nostalgia for milk-floats and the busy racial mix of Acton High Street, I reread Browning’s, Oh to be in England. It wasn’t April and there are no melon flowers in Montecchio; nor, if there were, would I find them gaudy, for nothing pleases me more than bright colours. Then the things Browning remembered about England are not the things I remember. I go for the back seat up top of a Victoria-bound bus, or gusting wind on the upper Edgware Road. The orchard bough, the swallows, the thrush, are not part of my memories of home. And anyway, all these things can be found in abundance in both Tuscany and the Veneto. There is no need to feel nostalgic for what is all around you. So that perhaps, rather than making any real comparison between the two countries, all Browning was saying, in his very beautiful way, was that he was homesick. And also, by curious implication, that he was not coming home. For anyone whose homesickness can be so exquisitely relished, so effectively deployed, has long passed the point of no return. Browning remembers England the way a happily married man, surprised by a scent some warm spring evening, might remember an earlier girlfriend: with thanks, with pleasure, even a ghost of regret, but no real urgency. If this book is anything, I hope it suggests how I passed that point of no return. Which is a process of immersion in details, whether they be pleasant or unpleasant. For details are sticky as spider’s silk; you are very soon caught. And rather than a travel book, perhaps if there were such a category in the libraries, I should call this an arrival book. For by the end, this small square handkerchief of Italy I live in has become home for me. Hopefully, for just a moment, the reader will have been able to feel at home here too.
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Copyright © Tim Parks 1992
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First published in Great Britain in 1992 by William Heinemann
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