Mario, who has just arrived — stout, solid, businesslike — announces that he has decided to change all the doors in his apartment because the wood is such poor quality. A litany begins: electrical fittings, mixer taps, shutter catches… Since a builder must always be anathema no sooner than one has bought from him, I propose a toast: that Righetti’s child, when it arrives, be a little daughter. ‘Cattivo!’ they all shout, which is to say, ‘Unkind!’ or to a child, ‘Naughty!’ But everybody is smiling. After all, they all have maschietti. Let Righetti eat his heart out over a girl.
Running round the sofa, Gigi knocks a lamp off a low table. Francesca shouts at him. ‘Smettila!’ Stop it! Despite the accident, the blond and chubbily handsome Gigi continues to rush around. Half-heartedly Francesco suggests that the boy, his son, might like to go to bed, an idea that nobody else picks up in the general fussing to see if the lamp is broken. Nor is the notion proposed again as we finally arrange ourselves around the table to talk. At ten-fifteen Gigi continues to whoop in and out of the kitchen, helping himself from the fridge.
Where is my Michele, Silvio’s wife, Sabrina, asks. How on earth am I managing alone? When I reply that Michele is in bed, others at the table show a mixture of awe and concern.
‘You have left him alone in bed at only two and a half?’
I point out that it’s late for a little boy, and I am just about to go on to say that his bedtime is seven o’clock, when I remember that there is no word or expression to translate ‘bedtime’ into Italian. There is something coercive about the notion of a ‘bedtime’. It suggests that there comes a moment when parents actually force their little children to go to bed and will not take no for an answer, something unthinkable in these more indulgent climes. In explanation, I have to say that Michele ‘habitually goes to bed at seven o’clock’, which gives quite a different impression, and Francesca in particular marvels at what a wonderful little boy my Michele must be hurrying off to his bed so early, not realising that I had to pin the chap down for half an hour or more while I sang to him and told stories and said that Mummy would be back very soon, until finally he got more bored than I was and tired of all the crying he’d done and fell asleep. On more than one occasion I have heard such behaviour described by Italians as cruelty.
‘But what if he wakes up?’ Sabrina asks. ‘Poverino!’ (Their own two-year-old, Giovanni, they have left with his grandparents.)
I remark that it is only two short flights of stairs away from my flat and the door is open. I will hear if he cries.
‘The door is open? To the apartment?’
‘Yes.’
There is now considerable concern that someone might get in and do something awful.
‘But the front door to the palazzina is closed,’ I point out. ‘We would hear if anybody came in or went out.’
‘The doors to the apartments are good,’ Silvio says, sitting down at the place offered to him, and obviously making a contrast with the other fittings we have been criticising; he shakes his head, ‘but not the main door to the block.’
The word ‘good’ here, as used by Silvio, means safe against thieves. The front door to a Righetti apartment weighs two hundred kilos and has an armoured steel core and security locks top and bottom that bolt into the steel frame on both sides. It is one of the first things the builder shows prospective customers, inviting them to swing it from side to side and feel its weight, to examine the dark holes in the armoured frame where the security bolts go deep deep deep as you turn each lock not once, not twice, but three times. In stark contrast, the front door to the whole palazzina is a stylish affair, with little glass panes. Child’s play to put a brick through and turn the handle inside. Without actually saying it, Silvio is telling me that I am relying on the wrong defence to keep out trouble.
‘And the shutters on the ground floor need bars on them,’ he goes on to tell Francesco, ‘otherwise a thief could just unscrew them from their hinges and lift them off.’
Francesco immediately gets up to go and look. All the men follow, crowding out on the terrace balcony above our wasteland garden with fields and vineyards beyond. And yes, Silvio is right, a thief armed with a screwdriver need only remove some forty woodscrews to lift off the shutters and get going on the shatter-proof double-glazing. From the distant barracks comes the whine of a bugle sounding the change of the guard. The village behind us is quiet under a frosty moon. The men discuss the positioning of steel bars. It seems pointless to remark that nobody even has any shutters in England. In any event, it is with these sober reflections on all that remains to be done to protect ourselves in Primrose Way that the meeting at last begins.
We sit down round an old-fashioned table to tall glasses of something frizzante, which young Gigi insists on trying, as indeed he tries all the various kinds of dolce that people have brought to celebrate. Not because his parents are indulgent. On the contrary, they protest with seeming vigour. It is late, they say. Gigi should be in his bed. He is too young to drink wine. He has already had some chestnut cake after his dinner. Etc., etc. All the same, Gigi gets a little wine poured and grabs a pastry.
Everybody laughs, and it occurs to me how seriously instructive this must be for a young child, how precisely it enables him to grasp the absence of any relation between what ‘should’ and what ‘can’ be, between rules and reality. How often does one wake up in Italy to hear that some new law is being introduced, some back-seat safety-belt requirement, tax on government certificates, tax on visiting your doctor, so that one sits up and takes note and makes the appropriate arrangements, only to hear a week later that as a result of public protest the government has revoked the law or the tax or whatever it was, or reduced it, or postponed it, which amounts to the same thing, with the result that you are one of only five or six percent in the whole country who actually bothered to do anything about it. This kind of scenario has happened to me any number of times and will probably happen again, but not, I think, watching him guzzle a bowl of tiramisu, to Gigi. He will never pay until it is quite clear that everybody else will. He knows it is a mistake to obey a command immediately.
‘He’ll go to bed when we go,’ Francesco says wrily. Nor is the man ashamed to tell me the whole sad truth. ‘Or rather, he’ll insist on coming into our bed, so in the end I’ll go and sleep in his. Otherwise, I’d never be fit for work in the morning.’
Francesco is a delightful man, slightly stooped, phlegmatic, flexible, amiable, alert. His face, beneath closely cropped unmanageable hair, is dark with a beard that seems gloomy rather than virile. But this only makes it all the more attractive when his features light up in a bright smile. Francesco is a damage inspector for the car insurance division of a big financial company. He takes pictures of ruined BMWs, Fiats, Alfa Romeos. He knows the value of materials that crumple without breaking. He knows that often customers are claiming for damage and repairs that have nothing to do with the accident in question and for which his company is not theoretically liable. But he also knows that except in truly outrageous cases his company will pay. After all, that is why car insurance is so expensive. So that everyone can exploit it. Clearly, Francesco is infinitely better equipped than I am to give an Italian child an education. Worrying about a name like Via delle Primule, indeed! Everybody else seems delighted with it. Anyway, Sabrina says, all the new streets in the village have flower names: Via dei Ciclamini, Via delle Rose, Via dei Garofani. And they don’t have any cyclamens, roses or carnations. Why should our street be any different?