Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  The cemetery is rectangular and has tall walls, perhaps twenty feet high, like a little citadel. The crowd flows in from the car park, from the main road, from the pedestrian approach along an avenue of cypresses, and enters through the one big gate. Inside, there are white stone paths and more cypresses. The local authorities have cleaned everything up for the occasion. It’s a job they’ve discovered the immigrants can do. The porticoes around the perimeter wall have been thoroughly swept. The marble is clean. Heading off directly to their loved ones’ graves, people are dressed more or less as they would be for first communions, weddings and funerals: formally rather than sombrely. And they are all holding crysanthemums. Which have doubled in price this week.

  The English, of course, bury or burn their dead and then largely forget them, at least after a few years. The main thing is to have them out of harm’s way. But the Italians, like other Catholic nations I presume, behave differently. When I tell Orietta how my own father was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Thames from a plastic box whose colour and design seemed more suitable for the sale of ice cream, she is appalled, as if some awful sacrilege had been committed. But then he was a Protestant clergyman.

  The fact is that Italians intend to remain on intimate terms with their dead for quite a while, and not merely by remembering loved ones as they were or placing framed photographs on mantelpiece or dresser. No, they want to sit by a grave and feel that there is a real whole body right there beneath them with whom they can somehow communicate. Setting up this privileged state of affairs in a busy modern world where space, and likewise health, are at a premium naturally requires some careful organisation, as immediately becomes apparent on entering a cemetery.

  It is interesting, in this regard, how devotion and bureaucracy go hand in hand. On walking through the sombre iron gates past hooded statues and beneath the confidently engraved RESURRECTURIS, you find yourself in a fairly small space with graves in the ground before you and graves, or burial niches, in the walls around you. The niches are six high, the coffins being slotted into the honeycomb wall like drawers in a dresser. And the graves in the ground don’t look quite like English graves either. There are none of those leaning tombstones, that tufty look, that precariousness of stone and affections sinking lop-sided into the clay, so gothic and so romantic. Here on the contrary, everything is neat, rigidly perpendicular, brushed clean, the atmosphere of some quiet, tidy courtyard in a government building after hours.

  Almost at once, you notice that the graves in the ground are of two kinds: one where the covering tombstone is full length and more, one where it is smaller. Where the stone is full length, what you have is not a single grave with a single coffin six feet below in the earth and stones, but a cement vault in which as many as four coffins are stacked on shelves right up to the surface which is then sealed over by cement. These are usually owned by families. After thirty years, a coffin can, if more space is required, be lifted up, the bones removed and a new coffin with a fresh corpse introduced in its place. Obviously this makes for some interesting family politics.

  Where the tombstone is smaller, we have something closer to the Anglo-Saxon tradition: a coffin in the cold ground. But even here the organisation is rather different. The graves are not dug individually. A long trench is opened up with an excavator. Starting from one end, a coffin is placed on the bottom of the trench and covered with earth. The earth is then shored up with planks to prevent it falling into the trench, which awaits the next occupant. This gives the whole process a rather industrial feel. But this is not a problem, since the Italians are more ritualistic about death than romantic. And ritual is by no means alien to mechanics.

  The trench fills up. When all the coffins have been down there ten years or more, they are then all dug up together, the bones removed and the space once again available for the freshly dead. This obviously has immense advantages over the Anglo-Saxon system of leaving people in the ground more or less for ever. It also suggests that a grave is there for as long as it suits the living to go and visit it, not out of some eternal respect to the individual’s remains. Cemeteries are a social phenomenon.

  However, the practical considerations are more complicated than they may seem, and the authorities must be careful. If the same earth is used over and over, it becomes too rich and greasy; as a result of which rainwater ceases to drain away properly and the third or fourth round of corpses will not get enough air to decompose on schedule. One imagines that this makes their eventual exhumation rather unpleasant, not to say unhealthy. In order to avoid this state of affairs, sand and gravel are thus constantly added to the recycled soil to allow air and worms to pass through. If you are interested, the Arena will always keep you up to date on developments.

  The cement vaults cost money. They are family-owned and the recycling of spaces is under family control. The graves in the earth are free, and considered much inferior, if only because they suggest that the family did not have enough money or respect to purchase a cement version. On one such grave we find a headstone clearly designed to head off complaints from indignant in-laws. ‘He wanted to be buried in the earth,’ the wife has had engraved on white marble, ‘and I did as he asked.’

  Naturally, since these graves are not paid for, the families of the dead have no control over their recycling. The authorities merely inform relatives some months before they plan to exhume the plot. Relatives then have the choice of having the bones boxed and placed in a very small burial niche at a small expense, or they can opt for the cemetery’s communal ossary. If the relatives have moved, died, or otherwise disappeared, it’s the ossary by default.

  Thus for some people the Day of the Dead will hold a sad surprise. They come to find their loved ones and discover the grave is gone. The letter never arrived. Perhaps it was lost in the post. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy in the end. Things can go wrong. They scuttle this way and that about the cemetery, wondering if perhaps they haven’t forgotten where Father was: then tears, protests, the search for whoever can be held responsible.

  An equivalent problem for the very rich might be to have the remains of their dear departed stolen from the expensive family vault. Then a few days later comes the request for a ransom. It happens occasionally. The rich are inevitably churchgoers here. Indeed, it’s an interesting party game to ask people if they know of any rich, famous businessman or celebrity who is not a practising Catholic. When the head of the Ferruzzi family refused to pay a few billion Lire for the corpse of his dead father-in-law, the kidnappers sent a message to the newspapers, denouncing the industrialist for his shameful lack of respect.

  But a more mundane unpleasantness that might occur in Montecchio’s cemetery on the Day of the Dead has to do with the loculi, the niches in the wall into which coffins are slid. Colloquially, these are known as fornetti, little ovens. Since there is no earth to cover the coffins, they have to have a metal lining inside and are sealed so as to be airtight. The corpse thus burns itself up under its own steam as it were.

  But the unpleasantness has to do with the flowers. Each loculo has its little metal ring for a vase. You remove the vase, chuck the old flowers, put in the fresh ones and put the vase back. But for the upper rows of loculi you’ll need a small step-ladder to get up to the vase. Step-ladders are provided, although you may have to wait. Worse still, you may find, especially on the Day of the Dead, that holders of the bottom loculi (notoriously wealthier) have invaded the floor space with an extravagance of flowers. This means it will be difficult for you to site your ladder. You move the flowers. The person who placed them there returns and complains. Arguments are not unusual. Voices echo round the stone walls. The Arena prints a story about a group of old men who came to blows in Verona’s cimitero monumentale.

  ‘Non fortuna, sed labor’, claims pompous gold lettering in black marble referring to the exploits of some local entrepreneur. As with the graves in the ground there is a hierarchy with the loculi. You can have the cheaper variety where you are pushed
feet first into a long deep niche, or the more expensive version where you are introduced sideways and have a whole two metres of façade space. Which lends itself well to declarations of undying love or long lists of achievements, grandiose claims: Industria ed onestà, boasts another marble slab. The more preposterous dead. But for the most part the stones are simple: the name, the dates, a photograph, a tiny red light or lumino. These lights were once candles, but are electric now. All the loculi and indeed the graves are wired up. It’s part of the package. The electricity board sends the bill and gives warning before cutting you off.

  We walk about. There’s a buzz of low voices, the clipping of heels along the porticoes where flowers abound, the scraping of step-ladders. A subdued murmuring echoes back and forth between the high walls, the graves. The word ‘poveretto’ can occasionally be heard. It is very civilised. Sober, but not gloomy. There are smiles, exclamations, perhaps some tears where a knot of well-dressed folk are visiting the more recently deceased. The day is bright, the flowers attractive, likewise the sun on clean stones. People come, pay their respects, go. Old attachments are at once acknowledged, distanced, given structure. There’s a sort of serenity about it, which is charming in its way.

  We find il professore’s loculo: Umberto Patuzzi. The photograph is recognisable, although one had almost expected to see him standing beside one of his road signs – to where? Purgatory? Paradise? With his little backpack. Instead, he is wearing a collar and tie like the people walking along the gravel paths around him. And he, or perhaps Maria Rosa, resisted the temptation to put in a photo of a much younger man. He looks his sixty something years. Whereas Lucilla has already chosen her grave snap; and shown it to us. A flirty, well-built young woman of thirty years before. ‘They feel sorrier for you,’ she explains.

  Beside il professore’s small slab is a square of blank cement: the freshly inserted Maria Rosa, as yet without her stone. It’s disgusting, Lucilla tells us that evening, that Signora Marta, being the niece and closest relative, hasn’t even ordered a stone yet. It simply makes it clearer than ever that she never cared for the woman, she just wanted her money. Well, she’ll never get it. Nor her flat. Never, never, never! After her day dutifully carrying flowers around, Lucilla is burning with rage again. ‘Because the flat is mine, mine, mine,’ she shrieks, giving me a key to the garage at last.

  And indeed our position in Via Colombare appears to be getting more precarious. Following Maria Rosa’s death, Signora Marta produced a will apparently written in the last days of the old woman’s life. It leaves all the property to her and she is eager to sell the flat as soon as she has the title deed in her name. Fortunately, Lucilla has produced her will too and is contesting Marta’s, saying the signature must have been assisted and is thus invalid. Indeed, she is now accusing Marta of corruption and fraud and her lawyer has asked for the opinion of a handwriting expert. But Lucilla wants to sell too if she wins. Either way we lose.

  And we begin to get telephone calls. The woman with the twig broom and the garage extension doesn’t want to be nosy, but is the flat for sale? And who owns it exactly? Her nephew will soon be finishing university and … For a couple of weeks we get one or even two such calls a day. So and so has mentioned to so and so that Flat 4 Via Colombare 10 may be for sale and since their daughter is shortly to be married …

  From over his wall, where he is digging the ground to let the frost in, Lovato watches. He hangs around, and when I’m out there doing some condominium duty, he motions to me to show he wants to speak. Is the flat for sale? His daughter and son-in-law are cramped living with them. There’s only one garage for two families, and if …

  Thus, it occurs to us at last that when all those people came out on to the street that first day we arrived, it wasn’t just because they wanted to enjoy the spectacle of Lucilla’s raving. No, they all have designs on our flat. Pretty well every family in the street. If it becomes available they want to be able to buy it. For the dream of so many of these people is not only to remain at home, but to have their children and grandchildren remain at home too. They would do anything to stay in the same village and as near as possible to all their relatives from birth until death; and afterwards too, the attraction of the vault as opposed to the grave in the earth being precisely that proximity: Papà at the bottom, then Mamma, the brothers, the sisters, the children and all the long slow recycling afterwards.

  Most of them seem to manage it – to stay at home that is. The local paper tells us that some 70 per cent of residents in Montecchio were born and bred here (the figure is disturbingly close to the Christian Democrat vote). For myself, I can never decide whether this indicates a sad lack of any sense of adventure, or the true flowering of wisdom. The way I can never decide if the formal atmosphere of annual cemetery visits is the height of civilisation, or merely a suffocating cultural inertia. In any event, the effect on house prices in a place where the population long outstripped new building will be obvious enough.

  Lucilla’s lawyer is bullish. So Lucilla asks us if we would mind prospective buyers coming in to look at the flat. She can thus have a contract drawn up even before the place is actually hers. This is nerve-racking. We suggest she might do better to show them her own flat which after all is the mirror image of ours, and, frankly, rather better furnished. She responds well to flattery. Troppo gentile, Signor Tino. And people gaggle round the top of the stairs being shown into her flat. Lucilla’s is always the loudest voice. The words valido and discreto are heard, perhaps in unconscious imitation of Giampaolo. Viewers study the fittings, practised hands swing the front door to and fro to feel the weight. Clearly, it will need reinforcing, another security lock perhaps, but over all …

  I point out to Lucilla that we might want to buy the flat ourselves and that she did once say she would be happy for us to do so. Then, from a legal point of view, as sitting tenants we surely have the right of first refusal. She is polite but uneasy. For selling also means doing a selected person or a selected family a favour. But yes, she says, if we are really interested of course we can buy. She hesitates, then names the kind of price that chased us out of London in the first place.

  On the phone, Marta quite bluntly asks us if Lucilla is showing any signs of falling ill. Her blood pressure must be so high with her being overweight and always shouting. Then this business of turning the thing into a criminal fraud case is crazy and very ugly. Just an opportunity for the lawyers to get rich. Our rent isn’t even covering her legal costs now. Do we realise that? Mi scusi? And, yes, if she, Marta, wins she might sell it to us, but actually she’s rather changing her mind and probably won’t sell at all now. Her sister’s daughter has a boyfriend and they are planning to marry in three or four years time and …

  In three or four years time … I’m bewildered how far ahead these Italians can plan their love lives. And it occurs to me there must be some intimate link between being able to choose your death photo before you’re even ill, or decide which relative your corpse will replace in the family vault, and this ability to plan your marriage for some date that sounds to me like science fiction. Life is so carefully controlled here in the Veneto, so attractively wrapped up: cappuccino till ten, then espresso; aperitivo after twelve; your pasta, your meat, your dolce in bright packaging; light white wine, strong red wine, prosecco; baptism, first communion, marriage, funeral; loculo, lumino, exhumation.

  Driving up into the hills of an evening, to a trattoria, one looks back down into the valley and sees the cemetery: a neat rectangle of glimmering red pinpoints in the night, the electricity board keeping the sacred lights burning in perpetuity. Or at least till your ten years are up.

  20

  Statali, dipendenti, autonomi …

  ANOTHER WAY OF wrapping up your life in Italy is to become a statale, a government employee, a civil servant. Of course, every nation has its own way of dividing itself up. The English have their classes, the Irish their religious denominations, the Americans their racial origins: Wasps,
Japs and the like. In Italy, apart from the drastic north–south divide, one of the most deeply felt group distinctions is that of the statali and the non-statali: the government workers and the rest. Basically, as the rest of the population sees it, the statali enjoy a network of privileges so fantastic and far reaching as to establish them as a class apart, something almost approaching ‘party status’ as it was until recently in the Eastern Bloc. To truly understand your neighbours, then, you must appreciate their position vis-à-vis this conflict.

  The privileges of the statali (as perceived, of course, by non-statali) may be listed as follows: they are not obliged to work; they are not even obliged to turn up at work with anything more than token regularity; mid-morning and mid-afternoon they can take a long coffee break in the nearest bar and combine it with a spot of shopping, or with filling in their pools coupon in their favourite tabaccheria; they enjoy shorter hours than the private sector, which means they have more time for moonlighting; they can get cheap holidays in hotels and camps reserved exclusively for themselves; they can get very low-interest mortgages directly from their employers while they are given higher interest rates on savings at the bank; they have quite unbelievable maternity and paternity rights; they have a better health-insurance scheme; they have the right (so important for an Italian) to be transferred to their home area after a number of years’ work elsewhere; they enjoy the most extraordinary pension arrangements which often allow them to retire well before they’re forty on a decent index-linked income; but above all, and it’s worth all the rest put together – they are absolutely and utterly unfireable whatever they do, wherever they do it, whenever and how often, it doesn’t matter, they simply cannot be fired. They have arrived.