Upstairs, there’s a message on the answering machine. Rita is already fed up with the hospital. The incessant sound of the emergency bell is driving her crazy. She has persuaded the doctors to let her come home tomorrow morning instead of making her stay the required three days. Can I perform accordingly?
In his room Michele is sound asleep. Looking at him, I reflect that at birth, as Stefania is just born, the child’s experience must be more or less universal. At what point then do they actually become Italian? I have seen Michele fiddling with the little button inside the perimeter wall that buzzes open the pedestrian gate out onto the street. It is put there for people departing, so they won’t have to use a key, but Michele has learnt that even on coming back to the house, people reach their hands over the wall and use it, including people who have never been to our house before but who know that such things are common. So, there is a lock on the gate and even a spring-shut device to keep out intruders. But for convenience sake, and because electrical things are attractive, there is a button on the wall that everybody can use to open the gate, intruders included; just as children should go to bed at eight, but don’t because they don’t want to, and as there are excellent rules about all kinds of things that for convenience sake everybody disobeys.
Has my son taken this in yet? At two and a half? Does he appreciate how absurd and attractive it is? Or does he not rather just enjoy seeing the gate slam itself shut and then buzzing the button with his pudgy little fingers to make it snap open again? And will he finally, as a result of experiences of this variety, approach that triumph of expediency that involves holding two separate and mutually contradictory propositions simultaneously, so as not to have to go through the anguish of rejecting either of them? Gate with lock for protection. Lock easy for everybody to open for convenience. Who knows?
He still wears a nappy at night. I check it, change it. The front of his little sleep suit says, in English, ‘Dreams of Gold’, an excellent literal translation of the Italian expression for ‘sweet dreams’, sogni d’oro. I wonder are Silvio and Mario perhaps at this very moment dreaming of golden gates, telecomandati, of course, and does that genitive in ‘dreams of gold’ mean that the dreams are golden or that they are about gold? Would this in modern Italy amount to the same thing? The size-tag at the back of the sleep suit has also been written in English to enhance the possibility of foreign sales. ‘For the kids great’, it says. That is: large size. My Michele, like Gigi, shows every sign of being a whopper. Or perhaps I should say, wopper.
Ninne nanne
Very early in the morning, I get a knock on my door. It’s Francesco with the bad news that there’s a damp patch rapidly forming on his bathroom ceiling. One of the pipes in my floor must be leaking. On the phone Righetti pretends incredulity. Hard to say ‘naturalmente’ to this one. And when I arrive back from the hospital with Rita and tiny Stefania, it’s to find that despite having taken up four floor tiles, the builder and his worker still haven’t found the problem. Apparently, no record was kept of exactly where the pipes were laid. In any event, they certainly weren’t golden. The men bang on the tiles with mallet and punch. The baby cries. Rita curses. On his way out in the late afternoon, Righetti takes the opportunity to remind me once again that I still haven’t paid the first month’s rent on the garage.
In the evening Stefano and Marta call with baby Beppe, to see both new house and new baby. And while I try to explain — and I feel almost apologetic — that we’ve decided it’s okay if the children put fingermarks on the paint in the kids’ room, which, of course, Michele already abundantly has, Stefano shakes a professional head over the rush job in the bathroom and wonders whether the floor can ever really be perfectly flat again. Once something has gone wrong… to put it right… sai com’è?
But the baby, Marta says, is a spettacolo — a spectacle, a show. Oh, she really is. Un vero spettacolo! It’s worth noting what positive connotations that word attracts in Italian. After all, what would Marta wish you to say of her own carefully kept house, her cotto floor and pietra serena fireplace, her lounge that she keeps locked shut to prevent Beppe getting at it, if not that it is uno spettacolo? Whereas my mother always used to say: ‘Tim, for heaven’s sake, don’t make a spectacle of yourself!’ Meaning, don’t draw attention to yourself. And meaning, little children should be seen and not heard, or better still neither seen nor heard.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’m afraid, it was my mother’s pejorative use of the word that turned out to be the most appropriate for our new baby. Stefi made a most awful spectacle of herself not just during the day but at one and two and three and four of almost every night and morning, moaning and wriggling and vomiting and never never never going to sleep. Every manual and magazine was consulted, every possibly dangerous element was removed from the mother’s diet, including artichokes and peperoni. One doctor even prescribed, as doctors notoriously will in the Veneto, that we give the child Valium. Whether this would have worked or not, I don’t know, for we baulked at that. Certainly, nothing else did. The nights were spent, as the Italians say, in bianco — in white — awake. Though wakefulness would be a flattering description of the semicomatose state in which I moved, night and day, over the coming months. For not only was I continually shattered from sleep by Stefi’s nagging scream, but likewise constantly narcotised by my wife’s ninne nanne, her lullabies. I remember listening endlessly to the one with the chorus that goes:
Ninna nanna, ninna nanna,
La bambina è della mamma,
Della mamma e di Gesù,
La bambina non piange più…
Lullaby, lullaby,
The baby is mother’s,
Mother’s and Jesus’s,
The baby cries no more…
This turned out not to be true. Whether Mother’s or Jesus’s or both, the baby was still crying fiercely. In that near delirious state in which one drifts in such circumstances, I remember managing to feel irritated that the baby for which I was making such huge sacrifici appeared to be everybody’s but mine…
My wife sang:
Sorridi alla tua mamma amore
Che sempre veglierà per te.. .
Smile at your mummy, my love
She will always stay awake for you…
But this wasn’t true either. For as every parent knows, the person most susceptible to the soporific effect of a lullaby is the person obliged to sing it. Many a night Rita’s head would collapse red-haired on the pillow leaving that fellow never mentioned in any lullaby — Dad — to hold the baby and sing those more bizarre English songs that rather sadistically imagine babies swinging from precarious treetops.
To avoid singing for hours, one of the solutions we resorted to was a tape of lullabies. A languid southern croon offered some seriously sedative, even dirge-like pieces (most satisfactory) but inexplicably intercut with brighter, jollier things from unformed little girl voices backed up by an irritating accordion line of the kind one invariably picks up on the radio in Austria. This was entirely counterproductive, as if whoever had planned the tape wanted to put you to sleep only to wake you up again. Needless to say, there were no male voices.