There are seven of us round the table this evening: myself, the hosts Francesco and Francesca, then Silvio and Sabrina from the adjacent apartment, Giorgio from the apartment next to mine, a tubby, happy-go-lucky, slowspoken fellow, and finally (since one of the apartments, though paid for, is still empty) Mario, the man who is changing the doors (and light switches as it turns out, and door frames, and the spiral staircase…). Mario is altogether a more forceful personality. He has come along armed with four or five gardening catalogues full of photographs of plants we can buy. With our glasses of bubbly, and doing our best to ignore the shrieking Gigi, we set about creating a little paradise… for our children.
‘Which brings us,’ Silvio announces, ‘to the question of the gates.’ Inevitably, it turns out that the first thing to be established about paradise is, once again, how it is to be protected.
‘The gates?’ I enquire. What could there possibly be to say about the gates, except that I have just hung a pink rosette on them?
‘Some people have been forgetting to lock the gate,’ Silvio says, rather solemnly for such a handsome young man.
This is true. The big double gate that has to be opened to take a car out has a lock of dubious utility, which my fellow condominium owners insist should always be left locked. This means that one must first get out of one’s car to unlock and open it, return to the car, drive through, then get out again to close and lock it. Some people, including myself, it must be confessed, have been ‘forgetting’ the last part of this operation. Though not as often as I would like.
And this is dangerous, Silvio insists, because it means a thief could easily get in. He exchanges glances with Mario and with Francesco. It’s clear that there is already some kind of understanding with them about this.
I feel I’m being put on the spot and so point out that a thief could easily get in anyway. The railing is not high, and the pedestrian gate can be buzzed open by reaching a hand over the low wall and pressing the little plastic button, which is not even carefully hidden on the other side. Child’s play.
But if the main gate is open, Silvio says, somebody could bring in a van or even a truck and take away an enormous number of things.
Perhaps I should say at this point that, since all the owners are locals, condominium meetings at Via delle Primule 6 are conducted in dialect, not ‘proper’ Italian. As a result, it occurs to me now, as once before with Righetti, that I may have misunderstood, so bizarre do Silvio’s fears appear to be. But no, he now launches into an explanation of how, in summer, when doubtless many of us will be away on holiday at the same time, a truck could come in through the gates, park by the garages below his apartment on the ground floor above and load everything he has into the back. Thus while Righetti’s workers are almost expected to be careless and while the government can to a very great extent be ignored, thieves are assumed to be diabolically efficient and effective.
I apologise if I have occasionally left the gate unlocked. Doubtless this has been because I have been very taken up with the birth of Stefania… One of the wonderful things in Italy is that children are accepted as an excuse for more or less anything. I have even heard one man excuse an infidelity on the grounds that he was so happy his wife had just given birth to a… son.
Francesco now remarks how wearisome it is getting in and out of the car to fiddle with the gate when it is raining. Given that it hasn’t rained at all in the few days since people moved in, I imagine this must be a gesture of reconciliation towards me. But it turns out to be only a set-up for what he and Mario and Silvio have presumably agreed between them. Later I would appreciate that I am really the only one who comes cold to condominium meetings.
‘That’s why,’ Mario says, ‘I was thinking that we should invest in un cancello telecomandato’ — a remote-controlled gate.
I have often wondered about the etymology of cancello, the Italian word for gate, since cancellare, the verb, means to cancel, annul, or erase, rub out, efface. Is there, to some extent, the residual idea that upon closing one’s gate one erases the outside world with all its contingent dangers? What better, then, than to have an automatic gate to cancel the world… automatically.
‘With a cancello telecomandato,’ Mario earnestly confirms, ‘we won’t have to bother remembering to lock the gate, since it closes and locks itself on its own.’
Thus, in order to avoid the inconvenience of getting in and out of the car, we are now about to spend three million lire, of which I and Giorgio, since we own the largest apartments, will be called upon to pay the lion’s share, expenses being based on floor area occupied. Giorgio, guarded, polite, but capable of a certain taciturn belligerence, objects. He sells tickets at the local railway station and though hardly overworked is not overpaid, either.
But the other camp are compact and well organized. And in a majority. The fact is they want to have their cancello telecomandato. They really, really want it. And not just for the sake of security. Having bought their brand new white-stuccoed flats, they want to show they have arrived. In this sense the remote control gate is at once as superfluous and essential, or essentially superfluous, as the sprinkler system and the lawn lighting and the determination to cut down the cherry trees and remove the vines and have expensive tiles in the garage.
‘They already have a telecomandato at number 4,’ someone says, as though to clinch the matter.
But I’m dead against. In the wealthy American suburbs, I point out, they don’t, as I recall it, put fences round houses at all. The gardens just run down to the pavement. If we really want to save ourselves trouble, we could just remove the railings and the gate altogether. They would never present any real obstacle to a determined thief anyway.
Everybody laughs heartily, as when I suggested I hoped Righetti would have a baby daughter. What a great senso dell’umorismo the English have…
The rest of the evening is then spent choosing plants from Mario’s garden catalogues, with Gigi, showing no signs of sleepiness, pointing his chubby fingers at the glossy pages — ‘But I want this one, I want that one’ — then showing us the money in his wallet, then a scar on the back of his leg. At which the perfect defence suddenly comes to me.
‘They’re dangerous for children!’ I announce.
‘What?’
‘Automatic gates! There was a case in the Arena [the local paper] just the other week of a kid being killed when a gate closed around his neck.’
This is actually true. Remembering Nascimbeni, I make the corna gesture to ward off bad luck and am pleased to notice that nobody laughs at this.
‘I bought an apartment at the end of a quiet cul de sac so that the kids would be able to run out and play on their own,’ I go on with dreadful self-righteousness, ‘not so that I’d have to hang around worrying about a remote-controlled gate.’ In short, I don’t want the kids cancellati by the cancello…
Silence. In a rare moment of intuition, I have set two Italian ideals at loggerheads, or perhaps three: on one side, protection of the property, in this case reinforced by the fashionability of remote-controlled gates with flashing yellow lights on top and little beep boxes you can keep on the dashboard of your car; on the other, the safety of your only, high-investment child. It’s not unlike the collision of priorities that brought about the visione del bambino at the hospital. A tough one… Giorgio sends grateful glances across the table. Silvio admits he will have to investigate the safety aspect. The meeting is adjourned, and finally Gigi can retire to his, or rather his mother’s, bed.