Italian Neighbours

by Tim Parks

  In the end you have to turn to the extremist fringes to get any hint of policies. ‘Rome = Mafia = Taxes’, says the slogan of the separatist Liga Veneta. And another poster warns: ‘Bringing Blacks to the Veneto = Slavery’. Obviously somebody has a penchant for perverse equations. At the other extreme, the Democratic Proletarian Party wants ‘Nuclear Weapons Out Now’. The Pensioners’ Party demands social justice for the elderly. Predictable stuff. The Radical Party, splendidly idealistic as ever, proclaims: ‘No to World Famine.’

  Responsible modern-man Giampaolo Visentini is thus profoundly depressed. ‘They don’t even bother trying to hoodwink us any more, ‘he observes. Bepi just snorts. He won’t talk about it. It’s too ridiculous. In the sanitaria, herbalist Maria Grazia’s husband thunders for the Liga, the separatists. There are too many meridionali moving into the area. Have I heard that they’re setting up yet another cooperative to build houses for themselves in Mizzole? Have I? With that and the new high-security prison going up next to the barracks, we’ll have the Mafia here in no time. Amusingly, work on the prison is stopped the following week because it’s discovered that the contractors involved paid bribes to politicians to get the job. A student of mine tells me she was a Democratic Proletarian activist once, but then she realised they were just the same as all the others.

  Meanwhile, the debate on TV has switched to the technical question of whether parties should declare their allegiances vis-à-vis other parties before the election, so that people know what kind of coalition they are voting for. This is an age-old Christian Democrat ploy to have people suspect that the Socialists might desert the present government to form an alliance with the Communists after the election. Which would be the end of everything, of course. The Socialists insist that each party must simply present its policies and that is that. Whereas so far nobody has presented any. The Communists accuse the Church of using the pulpit to encourage people to vote Christian Democrat. The smaller parties try to have us all imagine that behind the scenes Christian Democrats and Communists are planning to get together and change the electoral system in such a way as to exclude all the others. There is an enormous amount of talking, much of it deployed about the furthest outposts of comprehensibility, and absolutely no debate. Nobody mentions interest rates, or inflation, or unemployment, or defence spending, or levels of housebuilding, or anything that might remotely have any bearing on day-to-day life. Nobody presents a programme or manifesto. As for the government’s record, it is never considered, since each party in the coalition always claims that the other members were responsible for everything bad. Oddly, there are no opinion polls, no suggestion that things are running one way or another. If I could vote, I reflect, I would have absolutely no idea who to vote for.

  Election day finally comes around. The baby is due now, but lying doggo. We wake to a perfect Sunday morning and hear the radio reminding the population that it’s not just a right, but a duty to vote. They must get along to their polling station before dashing off to swim at the lake or picnic in the mountains. They mustn’t let the election be won by apathy and indifference. ‘And if you really can’t vote today, remember that you have the right to take time off work to vote tomorrow morning. Up to two o’clock. ‘The amount of concern suggests fears of an abysmal turnout. Which I would find only too understandable. We shall see.

  Being a dutiful citizen, Rita sets off to vote. Who for, I have no idea. We follow the dusty road over the first and second bridges where people take the corners so courageously. The car park is full for early Mass. Six girls pass us on three bicycles. In each case the passenger stands on the saddle with her hands on the shoulders of the rider. One has an ice-lolly in her mouth, another a cigarette. The vines are stretching their tendrils across the pergola of the Bar Centrale in Piazza Buccari, where Moreno the halfwit, in deerstalker hat despite the heat, is cadging cigarettes and being gently mocked by men reading La Gazzetta dello Sport. And it’s only half past eight. One learns to rise early here to get the best of the day.

  We arrive at the other end of the village where the local school has been closed for the last three days to prepare it as a polling station. Although it’s difficult to imagine why so much time was needed. In the main entrance, a computer printout has each person’s name and, for some reason, their profession. There is an obsession about categorising people by profession. You then go to vote in one of a variety of classrooms, and in each classroom there are two scrutatori or observers. Not surprisingly, these are mainly the children of local bigwigs, glad to pick up the 80,000 Lire they get for their services. In the booth, you put a cross over the emblem of the party you want, and then, if you like, the name of one of the many many people who are standing for that party. Each constituency returns a number of deputies, and each party can offer a whole range of possible choices to fill those positions. Which means you can vote for someone in some particular faction of your chosen party, or for the man who has already done you a favour. Or is going to if he gets in. It makes counting terribly complicated.

  Curiously absent from the whole process is any real suspense vis-à-vis the result. The evening news offers no ‘swingometers’, no eager experts discussing marginal states or constituencies, no surveys taken of people leaving polling stations. This is partly because the quite extreme system of proportional representation removes any seesaw effect. A swing of 5 per cent means nothing more than a swing of 5 per cent. Not the difference between one government and another. And anyway no such swings are likely to occur. Perhaps 2 or 3 per cent will leave this party, but only to disperse among five or six others. Perhaps at the end of the day one party will have crept forward the few points required to shout victory. But, in the main, the status quo will be left untouched. For the truth is that, disillusioned as they are, most Italians will always get out there and vote for the same party they always have. The football supporter mentality, Giampaolo calls it: ‘You stay with them even when they’re losing every game and charging you more to watch every time.’

  Thus, despite the carefully deployed anxiety of the public broadcasting service before the event, and despite the fact that so many people hold residency and thus voting rights in cities far away from where they live, the turnout is a huge 90 per cent. This truly amazes me, and I bully everybody I know to try and extort some satisfactory explanation. To no avail. A love of secrecy, writing down the name of a friend of a friend in the polling booth perhaps? A residual concern that not voting might prejudice one’s position in some concorso to become a teacher, or caretaker (Vittorina and Lucilla were both unaccountably worried about missing the election)? Genuine fear of a Communist government? Or perhaps – and it’s the explanation I would plump for – perhaps, despite all disillusionment, a very profound, heartfelt satisfaction with the way things are and a determination that they should remain so. I plump for it because it has the hallmark of that profound schizophrenia, which is also the charm, of all matters Italian: the Pope adored and ignored, the law admired and flouted, politicians despised and re-elected. The gulf between officialdom’s façade and private thought could not be greater than it is here. But in the secret of the ballot box that façade is always supported. Nothing changes. Italy, one sometimes thinks, is as if frozen in the high noon of its post-war prosperity.

  I played a little game with my students on our last lesson of the year. I suggested they write down who they think their barber/hairdresser votes for and why. Normally responsive and fun to teach, my request left them nonplussed, diffident, reticent. It was as if one had asked some ancient Athenian to explain the Eleusinian mysteries. A completely taboo subject. Montecchio, in the event, returned the Christian Democrats with the usual 70 per cent of the vote, but I have yet to meet anyone here who will speak well of the party. ‘The only good thing about elections’ – Bepi deigned to mention the subject over an espresso with grappa at eight in the morning – ‘is that the results are so complicated that for a month and more afterwards there’s no government at all. And so for
a while, non possono rompere le palle!’ Which loosely translated means, They can’t get on our fannies.

  ‘If the country’, comments il frate indovino, ear perfectly tuned to the popular mood, ‘could buy politicians for what they’re really worth and then sell them for what they claim they’re worth, it could pay off its deficit in no time at all.’

  Doubtless our witty priest votes Christian Democrat.

  36

  La luna

  THE BABY WAS late. Rita was finding the heat and summer afa oppressive. We bought a fan and she sat at her typewriter in a stream of dusty air. When the Visentini got to know, Orietta felt it her duty to come upstairs and warn us that fans were controindicati. You sweated, then sat in the air from the fan, and inevitably caught a cold. She was also worried that we hadn’t got rid of our cat. Cats could cause all kinds of diseases when one had a little baby in the house. I often wonder if perhaps Italian houses of the future won’t be designed with some sort of disinfectant footbath in the entrance way. We liked our cat.

  Meanwhile, whenever I bumped into anyone in Via Colombare an eyebrow would be raised. Any news yet? If there’s anything I can do … Even the mechanic at the end of the street, smelling strongly of grappa after lunch as always, was in the know. Did I want my car looking over before the all-important trip? The last thing I needed was a breakdown on the way to the hospital … I thanked him and got filters, plugs and points changed at a very reasonable price. ‘Buon giorno Signor Teem.’ said old Marini’s wife ‘and how is your signora this morning?’

  What a far cry from the kind of reception I had been getting a year before! Clearly, I thought, a child is the ultimate passport to society here, a blank cheque to draw against vast reserves of Latin sentiment. Far from having my greetings rejected, I now had the opposite problem of having to discuss the relative merits of the various local hospitals with the vaguely mongol-looking woman, while the woman with the twig broom came to clap me on the back and tell ghastly stories about the gynaecologists at Borgo Roma where her sister-in-law had given birth. ‘Macellai’, she insisted. ‘Butchers. They jump on your belly to push the child out. ‘And she asked who would be coming in to look after me while my wife was away at the hospital. I wondered for a moment if I had understood this correctly.

  ‘Chi ti cucinerà?’

  ‘Nobody, I can manage myself.’

  She shook her head, whether in admiration, or despair at a changing world, I don’t know. ‘Troppo bravo, troppo bravo’, she said. ‘You English are so tough.’ And she added by way of valediction: ‘The full moon will be the night of the third.’

  Inspired by the consultant gynaecologist who gave our prenatal course, we have decided to go to his hospital in the small town of Zevio. He appears to be the only consultant in the Italian state system practising the Leboyer method. Or so he says. Obviously, we’ve driven over there once or twice to check out the route: fifteen miles of twisting country roads, with the last stretch, unfortunately, being resurfaced and hence bumpy as hell. A useful stimulant perhaps, but also another complicating factor in that delicate equation: when to set off. We time the trip at thirty minutes. Getting out of the car to stretch our legs, we find a sleepy, overgrown village with a truly vast main square, in the middle of which is a villa-cum-castle surrounded by a moat. The rest of this inexplicably huge open area is just a desert of asphalt crisscrossed by fading white lines indicating where five or six roads might intersect. On Sundays, we discovered on our second trip, the space is packed to suffocation point with a bustling provincial market selling cheap clothes, fruit, vegetables, and adventurous underwear of mammoth proportions, presumably for ladies like Lucilla. The traffic was backed up for a kilometre and more. Another factor then, is that one must not go into labour on a Sunday morning.

  The hot days drag on. We sit under the pergola at Centro Primo Maggio listening to the accordion. People with houses by the streams hang water-melons in the water to keep them cool. They’re too big for the fridge. Despite the predictable election results, the politicians, as Bepi predicted, have so far been unable to come up with a government. Nobody’s concerned. The shops begin to close as everybody goes off on holiday. There are the usual scandals about poor old people having to walk miles in suffocating heat to find a grocery open. By law, shops are obliged to run a rota system, but the fines are so small they tend to ignore the problem. You go to the post office and find it closes for the afternoon in July and August. There is alarmist talk about the unavailability of doctors in hospitals. We begin to get nervous.

  And then the big day arrives at last. Or rather night. Towards two in the morning the terms of the equation are finally and ruthlessly satisfied: fierce contractions. We bundle into our despised orange car and head south across the bassa to Zevio. We’re about half-way – San Martino, Campalto, Mambrotta – driving along roads that twist and turn unaccountably through perfectly flat countryside, when, over a distant dike, what should sail up into the sky but the moon, a perfectly round, splendid, shining white moon, full as full can be, and apparently drawing us to Zevio as the natal star to Bethlehem. How infuriating! I can just see the satisfied smirk on the face of our lady of the twig broom. Even Giampaolo will consider it as confirmation of his prosecco-bottling technique. Yet one feels strangely satisfied to see it too. La luna. So bright! So large! We speed on through field after field of silvery peach orchards under that presageful ghostliness lunar light tends to have, especially at important moments in your life. And it does cross my mind for a moment that perhaps the moon has more influence in Italy than it does back home. This would explain so much.

  The Chiarenzi hospital in Zevio has long corridors paved with cheap black stone. The porter gives a direction with his thumb, barely looking away from a TV screen. In a spare room, a nurse with nun’s headgear takes down the details. Then more corridors. At the entrance to the maternity ward a little waiting area is heaped with flowers and there is a small white statue of the Madonna. One gets to rely on her after a while: that simple passivity, absorbing all, at crossroads, hospital wards, cemeteries. Although somehow, through her very ubiquitousness, the quiescent figure becomes not so much a protecting presence as a reminder that, whatever happens, all will go on as before. Without her and her crucified son, usually much smaller and hidden away by some dusty central-heating pipe near the ceiling, you might imagine that what was happening to you here and now was unique, and desperately important.

  Rather surprisingly, I find myself wondering if the Madonna doesn’t have some quality in common with the moon.

  In the ward, a bright young nurse speaks to us in dialect and listens to the baby’s heartbeat through a wooden trumpet pressed against Rita’s belly. Interestingly, she is called Stefania, which is the name we have chosen if the baby is a girl. Which no doubt it will be. I’m pretty well resigned to that now. Not that I in any way mind having a girl. On the contrary. What could be more delightful than a little girl? Just that I had hoped the Via Colombare influence would not be confirmed. I’d far rather have a random world than a determinist one, however benevolent.

  We spend the night in a tiny room with Rita in labour and me fighting sleep. Enticingly, there’s a pasticceria right across the street which will surely open at seven o’clock. Shortly after dawn, while a crow sits on a branch not a yard away, a priest leads four men carrying a rough wooden coffin out of the hospital into the street. I decide not to remark on this to Rita. And when a light goes on in the pasticceria around eight o’clock, I selfishly hurry out for a cappuccino, only to hear that the bar is closed for holidays. The man has merely come to do some decorating work. And the pasticceria the other side of the village is always closed Monday mornings. A test of the extent of your Italianisation is whether you still grind your teeth when you hear that something is closed.

  In the event, the low lights and soft music of the Leboyer method have to be forgotten because that room is already occupied. ‘Full moon’, explains the nurse. ‘Haven’t had a birth for
a week and then six in a single night.’ OK, OK, I give in. But the baby, when it finally shows up, is a big bouncy boy. We are both delighted.

  The first duty of an Italian father is to buy a rosette, blue for a boy, pink for a girl, and stick it on some highly visible part of his house. Driving home that day, I found a tabaccheria in San Martino that sold me one for what seemed a rather expensive 10, 000 Lire. The lady at the till was desperately eager to engage me in conversation about the joys of parenthood: ‘Sì, sì, sì, a great change in your life, you can’t even imagine yet,’ she says excitedly as I walk out in a daze without my receipt. Back in Via Colombare I taped the thing high on the front door of number 10 and hoped that all the zitelle in the street would see it immediately and eat their hearts out.

  My second duty was to find two witnesses and take them along to register the birth. Since public offices are only open in the morning, this would have to wait till the following day. Giampaolo and Orietta were more than happy to help me out, and we set off early next morning so he wouldn’t be too late for work.

  Registration had to be in the village of birth, so it was back along the winding road to Zevio again. The comune was a baroque palazzo in the huge main square where traffic crisscrossed with impressive confidence across the open asphalt. At the top of flights of eighteenth-century stairs, a huge room with ornate ceiling and a long wooden counter was occupied by just two women toying with computers.

  The man who registered births was out for a minute, they said. Could we wait?

  I generally accept this kind of thing now. But Giampaolo looked at his watch. ‘We’ll give him five minutes,’ he said ominously. As with his behaviour over Negretti and his dogs, phoning the police at the drop of a hat, I was surprised by his immediately tough, legalistic, although always reasonable approach. ‘We have come to a public office’, he told the women calmly. ‘There is no queue, and hence no reason why we shouldn’t be dealt with immediately.’ Orietta tugged at his elbow. ‘Giampaolo!’ she muttered.