Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  ‘But they were still growing.’

  ‘Lucilla thought the season was over.’

  Lucilla was an extreme, indeed manic case, but it has to be remembered that this is the country where, if you go swimming any time after September, even if the temperature is in the sweltering upper thirties, you will be looked on with surprise. La stagione è finita. The season is over.

  Giampaolo, on the contrary, to plant a row of peas, brought out the encyclopaedia he was buying piecemeal and at considerable price. This would be at the weekend, since he had a regular office job. He laid the appropriate volume on a dry patch of ground and was careful not to touch it with earthy hands: if I happened to be around I would turn the pages for him and read. The spacing between one seed and another? Five centimetres. The depth of the hole? Three centimetres. Soil preparation … Brought up the last child of five in Venice, he knew nothing of the earth, but being a modern man he believed that information could be had from books. We planted the peas together. We did everything the book said. Most of them never came up. And the few that did were eaten overnight by the rampant snails.

  The ladies sniggered. As indeed Giampaolo sniggered when they tore up tomato plants that still had a good couple of kilos in them. Lucilla would stop you on the stairs: ‘Have Signor Giampaolo’s carrots come up?’ With that same half-smile around the corners of her lips, Orietta would say: ‘Now they’ve pulled up the pepper plants.’

  And yet … Giampaolo had considerable respect for the local peasant culture, because books teach this too. Parsley and spinach should be planted with a new moon, a lawn sown with a full moon, still wines bottled with a waning moon, etc. etc. And the old ladies in their turn had more than a sneaking admiration for anybody who could genuinely read a book and find something out. After all, it was Giampaolo who fixed their boilers when they burst, adjusted their cars and appliances, even if his peas never came up and the bulbs he planted didn’t flower. In the garden, everybody watched each other in a delicious tension to see whose culture would prove the most effective. And in this respect the situation was typical of the small handkerchief of Italy I live in. There is such a collison of ancient ideas and new. Which will win? In a way it was not unlike Elija and the worshippers of Baal waiting to see whose sacrifice would burst into flames.

  And in the meantime we were all watched by old Lovato, our neighbour on the Via Colombare side, whose tiny garden bordered on our own. Bald, towering, broad-shouldered, Lovato was one of the old guard, a never-say-die, pea-cabbage-tomato-and-pepper man, a retired farmer. His gaze, looking over the wall at our sad ornamental garden, was one of genuine puzzlement, turning to pity and just a hint of derision when his eye fell upon our miserable vegetable patch. In his own few poky metres he produced a quite prodigious abundance of vegetables in the way only the small farmer knows how: working the ground furiously and using obscene amounts of fertiliser, weedkiller, and pesticide. The snails must have felt sick if ever the faintest breeze blew from his direction.

  Stolid, solid and quite unashamed of a businesslike shamble of pots, canes and cuttings all about him, Lovato watched. Through wire netting. For, above the waist-high dividing wall, he had unaccountably erected a fence reaching up a good three metres and lethally barbed on top, although sagging and rusting. I say unaccountably for intrusion from the direction of Via Colombare 10 was surely unlikely. But it was interesting that neither Giampaolo nor the old ladies found anything strange about his wanting to guard his property so determinedly. If an Englishman’s house is his castle, an Italian’s is his bunker. There is this obsession with self-defence: railings, remote-controlled gates, security cameras, bulletproof windows, armoured front doors … No, from the Via Colombare point of view, Lovato’s attitude was understandable. But it absolutely must not be at the expense of the ornamental quality of number 10’s garden. Railings, yes; rusty wire, no.

  Lucilla and Vittorina had years ago asked Lovato to remove this vergogna (one is tempted to translate this as ‘eyesore’, but literally the word means ‘shame’, which is what they felt Lovato should feel). Lovato refused. Giampaolo more diplomatically referred to the fence as ‘antiestetico’. Lovato played deaf. He would not take the thing down. At which Giampaolo had suggested that the ladies buy a hedge which would grow up and cover it all. Yes, all three metres high of it, thus protecting the aesthetic qualities of number 10’s cemetery. The hedge was duly planted. This had apparently infuriated Lovato, who claimed it would eventually rob all light from his small patch, although it’s possible he was equally concerned about losing his pensioner’s view of our miserable garden (which must have provided considerable entertainment). He would go to court, he said. There was a law about blocking other people’s light. Giampaolo politely remarked that his ramshackle garage of breeze block and corrugated iron located to one end of the fence had surely not been erected with the appropriate building permission. Since this was where Lovato’s son-in-law kept the Lancia Prisma of which the whole family was rightly proud, it seemed unlikely they would be willing to pull it down just in order to embark on uncertain litigation against number 10. When Rita and I arrived in Via Colombare the hedge was a metre high with everything still to play for.

  To straighten out your topography then, we have the threatening hedge and nosy Lovato diametrically opposite the northern (and lateral) wall of the condominium which includes our living-room window where I sometimes stand beneath the elaborate, if dim, chandelier to look out on the world. To my left (and west) as I look out, is the long ironwork railing along Via Colombare, and to my right (never forgetting the mobile triffids in the garden between of course) Negretti’s tall windowless wall. And here’s a curiosity. Negretti’s wall has a cinema screen on it, a huge rectangle of white, for before number 10 was built the present garden area had been a cinema. Yes, rural Montecchio had once had a cinema, albeit tiny. Now of course the screen was no more than cracking white paint surrounded by broken brickwork where the cinema had been demolished and Negretti’s wall reinforced. Not a little of Negretti’s intransigence with his dog, we discovered, his almost relishing the disturbance it caused, was the result of his having wished to buy the cinema himself, only to be outbid by these two old ladies, who then ignored building regulations to stick their own palazzina rather too close to his. In revenge he refused to do anything about the unsightly wall, the yellowing screen, the broken bricks. Lucilla and Vittorina offered to go halves to have it stuccoed, but Negretti, like Lovato, refused. And the more they showed that the wall bothered them, the more stubborn he would be. The ornamentality of number 10’s garden was thus irretrievably compromised; for whereas Lovato’s fence might one day be covered by that hedge, no ivy could really get a grip on the smooth white of that cinema screen. As for myself, wandering around in stifling heat, hosepipe in hand, doing my bit for the lawn, the snail-sad lettuce, the scorched earth beneath the terraces, I would look up at the screen and wish with all my heart that the cinema could have remained.

  10

  Il palo della cuccagna

  MONTECCHIO MORNINGS LATE September. Seven o’clock. The tiles under bare feet are beginning to feel more than pleasantly cool. You go through to the kitchen, heave up the heavy plastic roll-down shutter, all the rage in the late seventies, but spurned now in the general return to natural materials. You have to be careful not to pull too hard or the thing will roll away through the slit and into its little box above the French window, to be retrieved only after hours of fiddling. On the outside, the plastic is peppered with holes where the wind hurled big hailstones in an August storm.

  You step out on to the balcony, air fresh and glass clear. Number 10 is exactly half-way along the street. In a lacquered morning light you see the Madonnina in her niche with fake flowers a hundred metres away to the right, the derelict bottle factory the same distance to the left. Opposite, above the houses, rise two more, rather nobler nineteenth-century mills, likewise derelict, one with an attractive design of little pillars and arches just benea
th the cornice some six floors up. Both buildings have been listed, their empty windows staring, innards gutted. And behind these again rises a low ridge of hills pushing south into the plain, with Il castello di Montecchio on top: a square tower, a wall, a taller tower, a wall, a third tower the same height as the first: Austrian defences. The Communist Party want to turn it into a sports and community centre. The Christian Democrats don’t seem to be able to find the money, or the enthusiasm. At present, amid banks of blackberries going to waste, it’s used only by the so-called emarginati: drug addicts, homosexuals, immigrants.

  But what a splendid sight on a bright morning, with the larks still twittering high in the air, the most delicate fleecy clouds (pecorelle the Italians call them, little sheep) curdling in milky blue above, and the light green horizontal flow of the ridge beautifully pointed up by the sombre verticality of cypresses winding serpentine towards the sharp silhouette of the castle.

  Down in the street, the old man who lives opposite slithers off his muddy bike. Giobatta Marini. Pushing eighty, hunched, flat-footed, fishing gear slung over his shoulder, he has his dawn catch in a plastic bag under his arm. The stout wife, who bore him all those table-tennis playing children, comes out in apron and slippers to meet her patriarch and whisk away the fish. An early lizard creeps between railings along the wall. And, leaning on the cool marble of the parapet, still in your pyjamas, you breathe deeply, as your father used to whenever he got a chance to be out in the country. ‘How marvellous, what air!’

  A boy in overalls, with bedraggled hair and pasty face, roars by on an ancient and deliberately unsilenced motorino. Leaving a cloud of oily blue behind. Well, OK. It’s all part of the happy scene, not unpleasant really and he does boast the name of Raffaello. At the end of the street he revs quite violently – a bit of frustration, unsatisfied libido to burn up. Fair enough. He works in the mechanic’s at the corner. But now he’s turned the thing off, the cloud of exhaust has dispersed, and you can relax again, breathe in this beauty, and breathe deep: aah!

  Until, quite suddenly, the whole marvellous morning is corrupted, tainted, transformed, by the most unpleasant smell.

  It’s sudden and overwhelming. One moment you didn’t notice it, the next the whole picturesque scene – castle, fisherman, Madonnina – has become a deception, an enamel over something that reeks.

  Words and smells don’t go well together, but perhaps I could describe it as a corpse smell, a smell of something wrong, an abusive, acrid, clogging smell, and certainly a smell that one shouldn’t be smelling at seven o’clock in the morning in a village in northern Italy. The chemical factory in the small industrial estate is letting off the fumes from its storage tanks. Go in, close the door and all the other windows too. Look at the fine morning through the glass you really ought to clean. And get the espresso pot on to drown that stench.

  The following morning, if the pressure is suddenly low and fine mercurial clouds are thickening over the castello, it could well be a chicken-dung smell rolling down from the factory farms which have taken over the surrounding hills as the contadini beat their long retreat. An all-pervading smell which may last half the morning.

  And the next day, if we imagine a rare breeze is flowing from the north after rainfall, it will be the smell of intensive pig farming further up the valley. Is this the worst? Or should pride of place go to the synthetic-fabric factory to the south whose methylated fumes, thank heaven, come only with the sirocco? But they’re all bad. They all add to that constant threat of encroachment which typifies these villages. They all have to do with making money fast on territory which is cheap because it’s being abandoned, territory which once provided a living, and little more. Unless perhaps a culture.

  The evenings are more pleasurable. There are no particular smells. Your wineglasses are perched on the marble parapet of the balcony while from Patuzzi’s abandoned armchair you watch huge moths whirr about the street-lights hanging from wires which run zigzag between the houses. The sound of Giampaolo’s stubborn hose hisses from under the balconies, the old ladies call to each other up and down the stairs over the babble of their televisions: ‘Cilla!’ ‘Rina!’ Tock tock tock goes the Marini tribe’s ping-pong. And a blackbird whistles quite beautifully at twilight. Over a period of a couple of months we get to know his call. We stand on the balcony and whistle. There is a pause, perhaps a minute. To tease you. Then he whistles back. And again. And again. ‘Lest you should think he never could recapture …’ but that was a thrush of course. The blackbird whistles, we answer him. It’s upsetting to discover later that he sings so well because Giobatta has blinded him. For on the mornings he doesn’t go fishing, old Marini will take the creature out into the country in its tiny cage, to attract other birds to the muzzle of his shotgun.

  Perhaps it shouldn’t be upsetting. This kind of thing has always gone on. This is the old way. Why am I so squeamish? Yet whenever I whistle to the bird now I can’t help imagining the moment of its blinding, and I both want and don’t want to know how it was done.

  Giobatta, of course, is short for Giovanni Battista. When a friend of mine recently took his child to be baptised and said, ‘Giovanni’, the priest immediately came back, ‘Evangelista or Battista?’ There was no other choice. You would have thought with his namesake ending up the way he did, Giobatta might have been a shade more mindful about taking sharp instruments to creatures.

  Night falls. But the gently swinging lights keep the street quite bright. In the glow, little girls are playing something like hopscotch. There is no bedtime here. They dodge about their chalk squares and shrill and argue. Comes the sound of clashing gears and a car scatters them, driving recklessly fast in the narrow space. Their parents playing ping-pong under the pergola do not seem concerned. A red light goes on above the Madonnina. Or perhaps it is always on but only noticeable in the dark. From the window below we can hear the ladies giggling together over their television. Comes the portentous sound of the pips. A woman’s voice announces that it is 10.04 precisely, then the strain of the tune introducing the evening news programme. It is an endearing characteristic of Italian broadcasting that they are not overly concerned about starting programmes on the hour.

  One Sunday, after a morning of particularly unpleasant smells, we walked to Montecchio’s industrial estate to check the situation out. It lies just the other side of the cherry orchard behind the Madonnina. Sadly, the orchard is closed off by a ten-foot-high dry-stone wall some hundreds of years old. You skirt around this barrier and go by way of the bus terminus, where the driver is enjoying a few minutes in a bar before his return trip to Verona (termini always coincide with bars, which is as it should be). The road here is straight and narrow with tall ivy-bitten walls either side. A first iron gate on the right leads into an avenue of cypresses and the cemetery. Then, after a large tarred area, which trucks could presumably park in but never do, you turn into the industrial estate.

  And are immediately surprised. For what you see is: attractive villa, followed by long low prefab; then, salubrious three-storey palazzina, followed by grubby factory; then, green-stuccoed terrace with cascading geraniums, followed by woodyard; and again, lavishly funereal garden, chemical plant; gnomed patio with barbecue, print-works; and on and on: expensive house, business, expensive house, business, expensive house, business for three hundred metres. All the local padroni live here with their factories and factory smells. How can we complain when they get the worst of it? Circulars from the Communist Party will later explain that the land was more or less given away allowing imprenditori to build cheap villas for themselves, their children, their grandchildren. ‘Not a single job more was created,’ they protest. Perhaps erroneously.

  But as industrial areas go, and when the early morning smell of lucrative enterprise has subsided, this is not an unpleasant place. Well-dressed families are eating ice creams on balconies. There’s a sound of chatter and children. A fat man in fashionable tracksuit is clearing up his toasting forks. The chained guar
d-dogs are asleep in the shade.

  Then on our way home we stumbled upon il palo della cuccagna. In passing I might say that everything I have discovered in Montecchio I have stumbled on. It seems in keeping with the spirit of the place. And perhaps it was only because we saw them both on the same day that it occurred to me that this amusing celebration was not entirely unconnected with the mentality that produced the industrial zone.

  We had planned to walk back a different way so that we could lounge on the Roman stones by Laghetto Squarà for a while, something that was becoming a favourite pastime: just sitting and watching, in the heat, by the water, with the sound of the spring gurgling across pebbles from under the broken church door. But the banks of the laghetto were packed this afternoon. A hundred and more people were shouting and cheering. As we approached, the cheering grew louder and louder, then a great splash. And more cheers, or jeers, before somebody called a name on a megaphone.

  We climbed up on a stone. Into a drain hole in the bank, the trunk of a fir tree, perhaps twenty metres long, had been fixed so that it stretched out horizontally just above the water, supported half-way by a spike driven into the lake bottom. A small red flag fluttered right at the end where the pole was no more than four or five inches thick. On the bank, above the base of the trunk, stood a small gaggle of boys and men in swimming costume, shivering under towels. Beside them, on a high stool, sat the umpire.

  The umpire calls out a name. The boy who serves me my prosciutto crudo in Brandoli’s, the supermarket, lets himself down gingerly over the weedy stone on to the base of the pole, and begins to walk. All he has to do is reach the other end of the pole and grab the flag. This feat will transport him into the land of Cockaigne, that is, he will get a reward. In the event, despite the thickness of the pole at its base, he manages no more than three metres.