Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  We sit down. Vittorio begins to describe the qualities of each of his bottles at considerable length. Since he speaks only dialect and, unlike his wife, isn’t at all embarrassed about it, I can’t understand. I pick up half of a jolly joke about a dog that only went for dead birds. ‘Don’t let him come near me then,’ is the punchline. Bird in Italian also means John Thomas.

  Midday. The abundant lasagna. The labelless wine bottles. The smoke from an unnecessary fire in the huge limestone grate. Big thick steaks, which of course Bepi gets through a friend of a friend who would never give him anything but roba buona – good stuff. Then tiramisù, again abundant, creamy, calorie-rich, cholesterol-rich, splendid. Alongside a treacly Recioto. And, finally, a score of different grappas to choose from after, or with, your espresso. Vittorio makes the grappa himself, with what’s left after making the wine, flavouring it with such things as lemons, peaches, oranges, even coffee. The different brews are arrayed before us in the kind of tall, greasy, nameless bottles one expects to find in the garage with a couple of inches of brake fluid in the bottom. I try two or three and make a toast to the UFOs.

  Going back in his greengrocer’s van, Bepi tells me that what he’d like to do is study theology. The Church and the Masons still hold on to many of the deepest secrets of this world; only the initiated will ever be allowed to know anything worth knowing. He has applied to join a lodge and is studying the cabbala in the evening when he can stay awake. Vaguely it occurs to me that this is all part of the P2 mentality. And I wonder if Bepi isn’t the closest I am ever likely to get to a Renaissance man.

  13

  Troppo gentile

  TO BE EARTHQUAKE-PROOF, modern Italian buildings are legally required to be constructed around a reinforced concrete frame. In the event of tremors, the whole structure should thus shift as one unit, rather than crumbling into its separate parts. And, indeed, as one walks about the outskirts of Montecchio and on into the surrounding hills, builders are eagerly pouring cement into columns of roughly nailed planks, in a hurry to get things done before the November rains.

  Concrete the columns and the beams, where shortly before were olive trees; concrete the roofs, too, of these new palazzine and case a schiera; and likewise concrete the floors, all wires and plumbing laid forever inaccessible in the cement. Gaunt frames take over a vineyard. Up go the walls between one beam and the next. The roof is then topped with terracotta, the living-space inside tiled with ceramics: sombre colours and smaller tiles in the seventies, brighter gloss-finish colours and much larger tiles in the eighties.

  It makes for some rather curious acoustics. With no wood, you are saved the creaking board, the moaning stair. If you want to sneak in to check on a sleeping baby, or, God forbid, sneak out on wife or husband, there is no danger of the floor betraying you. In stockinged feet you are soundless. On the other hand, a hard object dropped on that ceramic-on-concrete floor, even a coin, will be heard in every room in the building, volume and intensity depending on the vicinity to a loadbearing beam or column. Patent leather soles clicking across the tiles will thus click across all the floors and ceilings of the condominium. A lavatory flushing in the dead of night is an explosion, an act of terrorism. And if you should take a drill to the wall and, after penetrating the plaster, happen upon one of those steel-reinforced columns, then all over the building, from taverna to solaio, it will seem that the eventuality for which the structure was designed is in full swing. The air vibrates. Soundwaves oppress the ear. It is as if one were caught inside a guitar with some naughty Brobdingnagian child incessantly twanging the bass string.

  We did experience a couple of small quakes in Via Colombare. The palazzina shuddered and sang. Patuzzi’s wineglasses tinkled on their shelves. Apparently, columns of trucks were passing in the night, or ships’ engines starting up in the basement.

  Lying down to sleep of an October evening, thankful that we can now close the windows against the TVs, accordions and ping-pong of the velvety dark outside, we hear instead an unmistakeable fierce trickling, coming, well, presumably from below us. At eleven-thirty every night. Trickle trickle trickle, dribble dribble, drop, drop, stop. We hold our breath. But there is no explosion of flushing, for unspoken condominium etiquette requires that the toilets tacciono – fall silent – after eleven o’clock. It’s a special kind of intimacy this concrete brings.

  Trying to sleep again after being woken by Vega in the early hours, I begin to hear footsteps going back and forth in our solaio under the roof above. This is alarming. Slow heavy footsteps, back and forth, back and forth, above our heads. Rita confirms, they definitely come from our solaio, supposedly an empty attic. And in the dead of night one believes in fantasmi. Vega has been moaning rather than barking this evening, howling and wailing at the moon.

  I get up, pull on a pair of trousers, then slippers against the cold tiles, and go out of the flat and up the stairs. Where I slip and fall on the highly polished marble. This particular flight to the roof is rarely used, but Lucilla waxes it regularly just the same. Everything must always be just so, a mausoleum odour. Cursing and rueful, I reach the iron door of the solaio, open it, and then remember I still haven’t put a light bulb in. At which point the timed landing light goes out. I grope for the switch, but don’t know where it is on this floor. So I go into the solaio blind.

  I stare, waiting for my pupils to dilate, recognising a smell of geranium cuttings and thick dust. A dark, softly shifting light, filtering from the attic’s one window, finally enables me to see the shadows of untidily piled boxes, an ancient bed, a crucifix, a pair of bellows unaccountably left on the windowsill, and rows and rows of il professore’s old climbing boots. None of them moving, thank God. I cock my head. No sound.

  But back downstairs, the footsteps go on and on above us.

  Talking to Orietta, the quiet repository of all condominium gossip, we discover that Lucilla suffers from insomnia. The footsteps are hers, the ventriloquist building sends the sound where it will.

  Orietta is loosening up. She is losing her suspicion of my Englishness. She recognises the advantage of having other non-Montecchiesi to make friends with. Giampaolo, she tells us, has frequently complained about those footsteps. Getting up in the night, it seems, Lucilla will put on her fur coat, partly against the cold, partly because she likes her fur coat; she finds its luxury comforting, its monied smell reassuring. But since she is small and bought the coat long, she puts her heels on so as not to have it trail on the floor. And paces up and down.

  Another night it is the squeal of heavy furniture being scraped above our heads. Bumps and banging. Thud, scrape, squeal. Yes, Lucilla tells us brightly on the stairs, she decided to rearrange the sitting-room, do we want to come and see it?

  Please would we come and see it?

  Perhaps we would take a little drink with her? She has some Lacryma Christi.

  Or perhaps we would like to have a piece of her pastafrolla?

  Surely, if she isn’t disturbing us, we would like to come and see her new curtains, eat her shortbread? Also, if we could explain something in the instruction book to her steam iron …

  There is a scene in Fellini’s film, La voce della luna, where a local politician, fallen upon hard times, is seen returning to his dreary flat in an old palazzotto in some tiny town of the Po valley. But every time he climbs the stairs and approaches his door, whether it be two in the afternoon or two in the morning, four ancient neighbours will appear at the door opposite and, like awful decaying sirens, try to lure him into their flat to share some old-fashioned dainty: a thimbleful of some sweet forgotten liqueur, a morsel of traditional crumbliness. Their faces are pictures of decrepit flattery and seduction. Close to obscenity. The furniture, dingily glimpsed behind them, is sombre and coffin-inspired with candlesticks in abundance, photographs of dead relatives on lace doilies. ‘Would a small glass of sherry be to your liking, your honour? Would a small slice of pan di spagna, councillor, be acceptable as our humble offering?’ Their vein
y hands are outstretched in supplication. Which is immediately perceived as a trap, as if a whole culture were refusing to lie down in its grave, but were rising ghoulish to eat our contemporary flesh. Horrified and furious, the man manages to escape into his room, slams and bolts the door behind him. But already the four leathery faces are down by the keyhole. ‘Would your honour be so kind as to take a glass of brandy with some humble folk …’ They haunt his dreams. He sees their faces floating outside his window at night with the moon behind, luring him back into some archaic, provincial Italy of polished woodwork and thickly smoking candlewax, flattery, favours, back-stabbing.

  Such, for me, were Lucilla’s insistent invitations. So that I almost looked back with regret on her ravings from the balcony, her confiscation of the dustbin. Those days when I at least knew where I stood.

  Barely has she got us inside her polished door – troppo gentile, too kind, Signor Tino (she never registered the name Tim) – than she is leaning out into the stairwell calling down to Vittorina. She has a direct intercom connection with Vittorina’s flat, but prefers to call down the stairwell, if only to remind all residents in the condominium of her existence. ‘Rina! Rina! Come and have something to drink with i signori inglesi.’ Is she calling up reinforcements? Or just increasing the size of her audience?

  We walk in, and promptly slither on imitation animal-skin rugs strewn over the usual lethally waxed floor. Lucilla is clearly nostalgic for her cleaning days. The year before we arrived, she slipped on the rug in the entrance and broke her hip. But this has not deterred her. I all but come a cropper on the synthetic white hairy thing between low glass table and imitation leather sofa. Vittorina, who has now appeared in a nightgown, hair thinner than ever, frowns with the air of one who is wiser than the person she is used to being bossed about by. And indeed, she doesn’t even try to remove her moustache as Lucilla does. A vanity beneath her.

  We are shown round the flat. The walls are simple whitewash, as in almost every Italian house. The furniture is what a local Veronese would laughingly describe as stile Bovolone, Bovolone being an industrial settlement twenty kilometres away in the foggy bassa where scores of busy companies produce clunky replicas of antique furniture. A Louis XIV dresser, bright and new, features prominently in the entrance way. There is a Renaissance chest in polished pine, and Lucilla’s is the first home, aside from paying visits to Waltham Abbey and Hatfield House, where I have seen a bed with a canopy curtain affair over the headboard, here upholstered in electric nylon pink. The room is about ten by twelve.

  Il professore was a great man, she begins impulsively, having put little red glasses of gingerino in our hands. A great man. Of culture. She speaks in fierce dialect. I strain my ears to distinguish the words, my mind to understand. It is not unlike trying to make out a strange landscape through thick fog. Was that a house or a tree, a tail light or shop neon? And we are going so fast. My head starts to ache. Still, at the end of an hour or so of non-stop haranguing, I do manage to discern the following salient landmarks, if only because Lucilla goes round and round them so insistently, not unlike Pooh Bear following his own tracks in the snow: so, il professore, that is, Patuzzi, had written a will and put it in his deposit box in the bank (half of Montecchio seems to have a deposit box at the bank). He then died quite suddenly, of a heart attack, breathing his last on the ambulance stretcher right outside her door, poveretto (obligatory epithet for describing the dear departed). And what a fright for her! Comunque, the will had clearly stated that the wife would have use of the property only until her death, after which it would pass to her, Lucilla. Such an exquisite man, il professore. As had been agreed of course. Because it was her money, her money had paid for the palazzina. She had worked her fingers to the bone all her life. So cultured. We would have admired him immensely. But no sooner had he passed away than Signora Marta and Maria Rosa were off to the bank, had opened the deposit box and promptly burnt the will. For which they themselves would burn in hell. Whereas we would never meet anybody more gentile, more generoso, than il professore.

  Lucilla’s bosom began to heave, it wasn’t clear whether out of love or anger or some dangerous blood-dark cocktail of the two. Then Maria Rosa had herself fallen ill and become infirm. Lucilla had looked after her, as was her duty towards another ‘Christian’, taking her meals which she handed over at the door whose threshold she was never to pass. Because that woman put on airs, while il professore, who might have had good reason to be haughty, was dolcezza itself. And when things got worse, Maria Rosa had come and more or less lived in her own, Lucilla’s flat; slept there for months, being nursed and helped to the toilet and so on. Until, finally, Lucilla could cope no more and the woman had had to go into a home. But towards the end of that period, in a fit of remorse, Maria Rosa had told Lucilla the story of the will and how it had been burnt and had agreed to write a further will herself.

  Lucilla fiddles under the flap of a rather oversized new Regency writing desk, bringing out a furry-grey piece of notepaper which she then waves under our noses. ‘Ecco, legga, legga, Signor Tino.’ Her fingers are stubby and impressively bejewelled. I take the documento with due respect. Uncertain handwriting announces the last will and testament of Maria Rosa Griminelli. The whole of Via Colombare number 10 belongs and always has belonged to Lucilla Zambon who built it with her own money. There is a single indecipherable signature, no lawyer, only the beneficiary as a witness.

  But Lucilla’s hopes are pinned on that scrap of paper. She raises her voice. She is furious, defiant. Her bony teeth are in evidence. ‘The flat is mine, mine, mine.’ But we are nice people, and when she finally gets hold of the property, on Maria Rosa’s death, she will allow us to stay, although she will have to ask us to buy it rather than rent. But we can discuss all this at a later date.

  Would we like a cioccolatino, a San Pellegrino Bitter? Would we like to watch television with her of an evening? She would be grateful if we could adjust her set. There is a programme on Tele Montecarlo with a man just like her beloved husband, here he is in this photograph. Così bello! Why did the men always die first? But she can never get a good picture on Tele Montecarlo. Signor Giampaolo has put up that new motorised aerial on the roof and it is sucking all the goodness from hers. Do I know anything about aerials? And could Rita perhaps phone her lawyer for her to have him explain something she can’t understand, and tell him to hurry up with the case.

  Lucilla talks on and on. There is simply no chink in her verbal armour, no hesitation into which one might thrust the dagger of a request to leave. Vittorina watches, silent, dark, with those sudden smiles when she catches your eye, smiles which say she understands your suffering, but this is Lucilla, this is how she is, porti pazienza.

  In desperation, we begin our long retreat. First simply getting to our feet, then edging out of the lounge and across the dining-room with its dark, dying plants, its sad canary, heading toward the entrance. Along a low wall is an array of those tiny twisted-glass Venetian ornaments, reminding me of my infancy in Blackpool, when we visited a Great-Aunt Esther who had row upon row of the things on a dresser.

  Do we think she should ask for the condono edilizio, the building pardon? You see, she had this wall knocked down, that’s why it is different from our flat, didn’t we notice, between the entrance and the kitchen … So much more space. But without asking for planning permission … and now with this pardon …

  Does she have the right lawyer? What do we think? Perhaps he isn’t being tough enough. Surely the rent we are paying should go to her. How much are we paying? Il professore only left the flat to his wife for use while she wanted to live there, but any rent should go to her, Lucilla. And, of course, in that home Maria Rosa is in, Signora Marta is putting pressure on her to sign another will leaving everything to her. But it wouldn’t be right, because Rosa isn’t capable of exercising free will now. She is senile. Though the doctors are all in complicità clearly, with what’s being paid for her to be there. All il professore’s for
tune. The priest said …

  Finally we make it to the hall. We are repeating arrivedercis, buona nottes, when I finally remember the purpose behind our visit, the subject I had originally come to broach. The nocturnal noises. We hope, I say, that we never, er, bother them, when we play our stereo, when we type late at night, when we have friends over. Noise carries so much in these buildings. One can hear everything. We wouldn’t like … ‘But no, Signor Tino, no, no, no, troppo gentile, troppo gentile! We like to hear noise. We like to hear footsteps, laughter, banging. The more the merrier. We’re two old ladies. It keeps us company. We feel less lonely. Ma troppo gentile, ma che signore!’

  And somehow Signor Tino just can’t bring himself to say what he wants to say. The way he can never quite make up his mind to poison that dog.

  14

  Condono

  THE CONDONO EDILIZIO was first mooted in the early 1980s. The idea was to recognise that there are vast numbers of buildings in Italy which were put up without permission: villas and cottages in the north, whole blocks of flats down south. Since, officially, these buildings don’t exist, they aren’t paying the modest property tax (although they do of course receive electricity, water, post and so on, and residency certificates confidently assert that people do live in them and hence enjoy all the rights that go with officially living in a place). There are also, the new law would recognise, even greater numbers of buildings which have been altered in some way without permission: extended, restored, disfigured, rebuilt. Under the terms of the condono, the government would allow people to register these buildings or any changes made to them and thus get themselves in regola as they say, paying in return only a fraction of the fine they would otherwise have to pay if prosecuted. For the government this would mean a considerable ad hoc income and the prospect of larger regular revenues in the future.