Italian Neighbors Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  “Am I giving the impression that I don’t like the Veneto? It’s not true. I love it. But like any place that’s become home I hate it too.”

  How does an Englishman cope when he moves to Italy – not the tourist idyll but the real Italy? When Tim Parks first moved to Verona he found it irresistible and infuriating in equal measure; this book is the story of his love affair with it. Infused with an objective passion, he unpicks the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture with wit and affection. Italian Neighbours is travel writing at its best.

  About the Author

  Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and John Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, A Season with Verona and An Italian Education.

  ALSO BY TIM PARKS

  Fiction

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara Massimina

  Shear

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Talking About It

  Cleaver

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  Non-Fiction

  A Season with Verona

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence

  The Fighter

  TIM PARKS

  Italian Neighbours

  An Englishman in Verona

  Author’s Note

  I often find it useful, or at least amusing, to think of a book in terms of a gesture, a mood, a posture. In which case the gesture of this book might be that of a busy but inexpert fellow dashing about the narrow confines of his territory waving a net on the end of a long stick. It’s not a butterfly net, by the looks of it. It’s altogether too big for that, huge in fact. But it might be a will-o’-the-wisp net. Which would explain the extremely fine silk mesh, the random way it is being waved. And if we were to ask this frantic fellow what particular species of will-o’-the-wisp he is after? He stops, out of breath, surprised at our interest. Well, some of the most common, he pants: national character, a sense of place, the feeling people, place and weather generate. And how is he getting on? He shrugs, pouts, as if to say, this is a mug’s game if ever there was one. Will-o’-the-wisps – you know – the thing is, even when you do catch one for a moment you have a terrible job recognising them, and then when you pin them on the pages of your book they immediately lose all colour and shape. Anyway, he is spending most of his time picking truisms, clichés and caricatures out of his net. Not to mention the mere grit and chaff the air is full of. You leave him to get on with it. He rushes off, apparently at random. And it seems that in his desperation he’s beginning to wield his net quite wildly, and perhaps in not altogether legitimate fashion, sweeping backwards in time when he ought to go forwards, allowing the fine fabric to fill with all kinds of things from moments years apart, and places, even dimensions, far from contiguous. You shake your head. Whatever it is that finally gets catalogued in his book, obviously this is not a man you’ll be able to trust on such imponderables as documentary authenticity.

  1

  Afa

  HOW TO FORGET the day we arrived in Montecchio? How even to begin to describe the weather to someone who has not been in the Veneto in July? For the weather must surely have played its part in how things went.

  We’re not talking about heat really. Or that’s only part of the problem. The temperature is maybe only 31°C or 32, which is not impossibly hot. One has managed with 35 and more on beaches down south or in the mountains. But there is no sunshine with this heat today, no blue sky, no colour, no air. Above you – and it doesn’t seem very far above you either – is a uniform, oppressive, at once damp and gritty greyness, the sun only a suspicion somewhere, a blond thumbprint, a smudge. Nor is there the slightest inkling that this strange, simmering, spongy atmosphere is going to roll itself up into some kind of raincloud or liberating storm. There’s not a breath, not a whisper of wind.

  You don’t notice it perhaps in the town, but as you leave Verona, heading east, you suddenly become aware how miserable visibility is. The hills immediately to the north whose cherry blossom you enjoyed so much in spring, the toothy peaks of the Alps beyond which were so dramatic in sharp and slanting winter light, have all disappeared. Perhaps you’re not seeing more than a couple of kilometres. And if – and God forbid – you were to turn south into the bassa padana itself, Po-bound across the open plain, you might well find, beyond Nogarole Rocca towards Mantua, a sort of brilliant grey heat fog, so dense the world will seem a haze and the other cars ghosts, and the vines and fruit trees and towering maize and tobacco plants one vast steaming minestrone of a landscape …

  But we are going to Montecchio, which, like Verona itself, lies at the foot of those first now invisible hills that mark the beginning of the long climb up to the Alps. And, curiously, it is the Alps, you are always told, which are one of the guilty parties as far as this weather is concerned. But only in this sense: that they shut out the merciful winds that might otherwise blow away everything that makes the atmosphere in the plain so unpleasant: the slow accumulation of exhaust fumes, the exhalations of a thousand pig-and chicken-factories, and the abundant insecticides that hover and mingle in the stale air over what otherwise, or in other weather, would be scenes of exquisite beauty.

  The local name for the whole phenomenon is afa – or lo smog (pronounced zzzmog). You pick your shirt away from armpits and feel uncomfortable about the crotch. The only thing close to it in British terms perhaps is a packed Friday afternoon rush hour on bus or tube when the Standard has taken up half its front page to tell you WHAT A SIZZLER!

  But, just at the moment, we are travelling behind the rusty white Fiat 127 of our future landlady, our padrona di casa. We are going to see and hopefully move into a 110-square-metre flat in the outlying village of Montecchio. Hence our own car, an ageing tangerine Passat, is loaded to the stops with all our worldly belongings; the boot is held down by shotcord over piles of boxes, the handlebar of one of our bicycles is creeping down the windscreen.

  Across the toneless, al
most invisible countryside, the narrow road is flanked by low cement walls, deep flood-emergency dikes, dusty poplars, cypresses, vines. We pass an occasional peasant figure, broad-butted on his puttering motorino, helmetless, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Or it might be a woman, shopping-bag between fat knees, kerchief tight on grey hair, monumental somehow despite precarious movement, the face so grimly set. Other vehicles our cautious guide chooses to overtake are a tractor with an ageing dog balancing on the mudguard and a three-wheeled furgoncino, a sort of motorised wheelbarrow with tiny cabin, handlebar drive and a pile of scrap metal rattling perilously behind. Meanwhile, we ourselves are overtaken by bikes so white and fast my wing mirror doesn’t appear to register them, space-suited riders flashing into the distance, and then, of course, the usual chase of black or metallic Mercedes, Alfas, Lancias, BMWs. It was a traffic mix, a social mix, with which we were to become familiar.

  Perhaps ten minutes out of town, without any noticeable change of speed, we find we are in a built-up area again; first a loose alignment of stuccoed houses, then the broad open space of Montecchio’s main, Montecchio’s only real piazza: small shops, tall cedars in two patches of scrubby green, a petrol pump with a weigh-in for trucks, a war memorial. All at once, the buildings close in, the road narrows drastically, the pavement on each side rises to a metre above ground level. Stout legs and slim are barely a foot from the passenger window. And still the traffic doesn’t change speed. We emerge, cross a bridge, wind left past the glaring heterogeneity of a huge new red-brick church, then more bridges, ditches and streams, until, just before the road climbs out of the village and into the hills, our would-be padrona indicates left and we are in Via Colombare.

  Narrow, perhaps two hundred metres long, and straight as straight, Via Colombare achieves an exquisite confusion of invading suburbia and peasant tradition. It is where furgoncino and Mercedes both come home to lunch. Closely packed along either side, the houses are all different: two, three or four storeys, one facing this way, one that, some centuries old, handsome or poverty-stricken, others new, crude or lavish; one pink-stuccoed, one blue, one green, many with just bare, pitted cement the same grim colour as today’s unpromising sky. There may be a new Alfa 75 drawn up outside one door, and a decrepit straw-hatted grandfather on rickety chair parked outside the next. To add to the sense of emblematic collision, from the far end of the street a painted Madonna gazes from her shrine in the wall of a cherry orchard, right along the flat ribbon of patchy tarmac to where a derelict bottling factory is due for redevelopment opposite.

  There is no pavement in Via Colombare. The front doors of most of the older, poorer houses thus open directly on to the hot asphalt. Their owners have to remember to keep their window shutters tied back in case a truck (presumably lost) should carry them away (one day it was an old stone balcony that went). And where the newer houses of urban arrivals or peasant farmers made good are set back from the road, or perhaps there is a garden, the welcome breathing space that might result is lost because of the obsession with tall and elaborate iron railings as an indicator of wealth. Likewise, gates must be tall and iron and complicated and, where possible, rendered all the more impressive by the addition of little brick and stucco shelters with terracotta-tile roofs.

  It was by these gates, as we parked the car, and by the humbler doorways with their fly curtains, as we climbed out, that the street’s inhabitants had begun, if not quite to gather, then at least to appear: a heavy woman with the alibi of a broom, a man not quite intent on forcing his dog into the boot of his car, others with no more excuse than the walls or railings they were leaning on. And it was impossible not to get the feeling that they were there to watch us. Not in any way suspiciously, nor with hostility. But with curiosity, yes. With definite and considerable interest.

  Well, we felt uncomfortable enough with the heat, the humidity. It was possible we looked out of sorts. And, of course, we were aware by now that Italians don’t drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste. Then despite our new Verona plates we still had that old GB sticker on the back, and so could be, what, from Gibilterra it has often been suggested. Yes, we were used to all this; in a mild, light-hearted kind of way perhaps we even cultivated it, for it is fun to be foreign, at least for a year or two. But however far out in the country we were, an orange car and an air of disorientation and discomfort were not usually enough to get ten or fifteen people hanging around their doors in the glaring heat to watch us. And so soon after lunch, too. Did they know something we didn’t? Were they expecting a show?

  Our future padrona was nervous, clumsily pushing the wrong key into the gate of what was certainly the most modern building on the street: newish lime-green stucco with a rough, graffiato finish, huge, broad, quite superfluous Californian eaves, double-glazed glass front door, large terrace balconies to each of the four flats. She made no comment on the watching faces around us; they did not surprise her. Was it safe to assume that what they knew, she knew too? And why had she insisted, so uncharacteristically for an Italian, on arranging our meeting at a time when most people were resting, shutters half drawn, dazed by the combination of heavy lunch and humid heat?

  Quite unprompted now, and in a nervous attempt to be offhand, this dry, thin-faced, intelligent woman with her small bright brown eyes was telling us about some gynaecological problem she had. She’d been to the clinic again this morning. All the tests doctors made one do nowadays. The time, the expense. Especially when one more or less had to go privately if one was to get any decent service. But who could afford to risk the unnameable diseases? You know how it is? Her hand was shaking. She was having terrible trouble with her bunch of keys, forcing quite improbable versions into the lock on the gate.

  My wife and I exchanged glances, looked about us. The sun did not so much lie along the street like a white-hot poker, as it would do later in August and September; it was more that the whole scene, the scarred asphalt, the flaking stone or cement of the walls, the gardens, the vines, the dusty ivies, were fizzing with light. Everything glared.

  ‘Eccoci!’ the gate snapped open. And at that precise moment Lucilla appeared on a balcony above us and began to shout, or rather to yell, to shriek, to scream.

  Lucilla was, is, a short, squat woman, big-breasted, fat, more than round-faced, tinted hair thinning almost to baldness, teeth with the quality of bones, set apart from each other and slightly protruding. Certainly the general impression she gave us that first day in Montecchio was not improved by the fact that every feature was contorted with rage.

  This, then, was what the inhabitants of Via Colombare had been waiting for. The tubby woman danced and screamed on her balcony. Her voice filled the air in the narrow street. She pointed down at us, waving her arm as if to hurl anathema and excommunication.

  I had been in Italy just over a year at the time. I lay no claims to being a linguist, but I think I had reached the point where I understood perhaps 80 per cent of what was spoken directly to me, and say 50 per cent (far more than enough) of what was merely said in my presence. But that afternoon I could identify not one syllable of what Signora Lucilla was so urgently bawling.

  I turned to Rita for help. She understood very little more than me. This was not apparently the local dialect. Which was reassuring. On the balcony above us the little woman continued to be galvanised by rage. A quite extraordinary energy. As if determined to spit out her teeth at us by dint of shrieking.

  ‘Pazza’, Signora Marta said firmly. ‘Crazy.’ She was refusing to look up and acknowledge the tirade. ‘Completamente pazza. It’s the afa.’ By great good luck she got the key to the glass front door first time and we were inside; there were creamy marble stairs, a feeling akin to coolness, tropical plants, a reduction in the noise level, but absolutely no time to lose. Up we panted past th
e two ground-floor flats on the first landing with their funereal, polished-wood doors and round, brass knobs; on we rushed to the second landing where an identical pair of doors again faced each other like diametrically opposed choices in some masonic trial. Our padrona knew to go left. Out came the keys again amidst growing nervousness. Ah, finalmente! But no, there was still the security lock. And Lucilla simply exploded from the door opposite.

  Later I came to think of Lucilla’s story as something that in England would be exclusively the stuff of nineteenth-century novels – child labour and deprivation, uncertain inheritance, deathbed fawning, wills burnt or buried and others with forged signatures or clauses added under duress with the complicity of generously bribed physicians – a world where money was not sensibly regulated by the likes of pension funds and insurance policies. I remember planning a novel around Lucilla, but then thought nobody would believe it, they’d think I’d been reading too much Dickens, was stealing passages from Middlemarch. Hence, in describing now the scene that followed, it seems natural to use expressions like, ‘her bosom heaved’, for heave it did, and greatly; or, ‘eyes and cheeks were blown out with apoplexy’, for blown out they most certainly were. Smaller even than I had imagined, and bigger breasted, Lucilla stamped a high-heeled foot as if to strike sparks from the marble. Her heavy jowls quivered. The blue print dress stretched and strained about her. Tears of rage rolled down her cheeks. And now we began to understand something. Her shouting had resolved itself into a simple chant of, ‘è mio, è mio, l’appartamento è mio! The flat is mine! Mine, mine, mine!’ She grabbed the other woman and shook her. She spat. As for ourselves, it was as if we hadn’t existed. Which was just as well …

  Still fumbling with her keys – I wished she would give them to me – Signora Marta at last lost her nerve. So far she had been playing cool city woman to this ill-bred, peasant savagery. Now she too began to shout. ‘You need a doctor, signora, a psichiatra!’ And in her eagerness to get away from the unpleasant scene, she yanked quite viciously at the key in the security lock and it snapped in her hands.