Io sono qui vicino a te
Zitto zitto, senza fare rumore
Sleep, Dad, sleep,
I’m here beside you
Quiet, quiet, without making a sound…
The whole song lasts exactly one minute and eighteen seconds, about twice as long as it would have taken me to get to sleep had Stefi been capable of doing the honours. Laughing with Marta, I asked her if Stefano had ever spent the night awake looking after the baby. But she said his work was far too important for that. When Beppe was little, he moved into the spare bedroom.
I could almost hear him saying, ‘Sai com’è,’ which this time can only mean ‘I bet you wish you did know how it is for me.’
Maybe three or four months into this via crucis, I remember discussing the problem on the phone with my ever resourceful mother-in-law three hundred miles away in Pescara. And she said, ‘Ma Tim, le hai dato il sonno?’ Literally, ‘But Tim, have you given her the sleep?’ For a moment I wondered if she might be referring to some drug I wasn’t aware of. Or perhaps it was merely that I hadn’t understood again.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Then she recalled that although I know Italian, I am not Italian.
‘Given her sleep. That means you put money somewhere in their clothes.’
‘Oh? Money?’
‘It gives them a feeling of security,’ she explained.
Why didn’t Nascimbeni tell me this? Or perhaps it was so obvious…
So one night in a volatile mental state between hilarity and despair, we decided to try this proverbial remedy. You never know. A five-hundred-lire coin in each sock and a fifty-thousand-lire note tucked into the top of her nappy, as if she were some kind of precocious belly dancer. It didn’t work. But then as Rita pointed out, I had forgotten to ask exactly how much money was required these days. Un milione? Un miliardo?
If I’d had it, I would have given it.
Ricatti
In the paediatrician’s waiting room, a little girl, perhaps four or five, tips over the low table holding the magazines, then begins to pick up the publications and toss them in the air. The mother shakes her head, says, ‘Smettila, Jesseeca’ (after Jessica Lange presumably), then rights the table. Other mothers smile indulgently. How can one control the dear little things? Since it doesn’t seem to bother anybody, I let Michele wander around singing to himself, pushing and poking the other toddlers, and in the meantime I pick up a copy of Donna & Mamma from the floor. The letter on the first page reads as follows:
We are two parents, aged 29 and 31, and we have a three-year-old girl who is getting us very worried indeed. Francesca was a first child, first grandchild, and, in fact, the first baby in a whole circle of friends. So she is surrounded by an army of people (grandparents, aunts and uncles, relatives, friends, and most of all ourselves, her parents) all ready to go into ecstasies over her. We both work only half days, so we can spend a lot of time with her and all four grandparents are very helpful. Result: Francesca is extremely fractious, bossy, moody…
Meanwhile, at the paediatrician’s, Jessica has managed to stand on a chair and is pulling a notice off the notice board announcing a lecture — ‘Intra and Extra Family Communications in a Pluralist Society’ — to be given in the town hall by some professor or other. The mother hurries to replace the torn notice and suggests that Jessica might like to play with some of the many toys that have been brought along: the frog that croaks, the doll that cries unless you keep a bottle stuck down its throat, etc. Jessica is not convinced. She wants to tear that notice down. Perhaps she’s not happy about living in a pluralist society.
In Donna & Mamma the letter goes on to say how, in response to every parental veto (‘and we can assure you we restrict these to the absolute minimum’), young Francesca goes crazy, shouts, bangs doors, even attacks her parents physically.
Somebody looks in from the street, sees there are too many people (four at the paediatrician’s means at least an hour’s wait), and goes out again.
‘The only thing that seems to work,’ continue the two desperate parents, ‘and please don’t be too shocked, is ricatti, blackmail. “Be a good girl, otherwise we won’t take you to the playground.” “Don’t shout, otherwise we won’t let you see a video.” “Do us a favour and we’ll do you one…”’
But this is a method these conscientious parents really don’t want to use. It is poco educativo — not very educational — in the sense of not bringing up the children as one should. How can one, they wonder, sink to blackmailing a three-year-old child? And they complain that the girl’s fractiousness is beginning to affect them. They are getting more and more irritable themselves, less and less willing to try ‘to understand her’. ‘Even though we adore Francesca,’ their missive finishes.
Jessica has just begun to attack the carpet with a pencil when the door to the surgery opens and the mother can grab her by the hand and take her in.
‘Bella bambina,’ says one of the other women appreciatively.
‘Very lively,’ I agree.
Then before I can stop her, the other woman, who I recognise as the cashier in the butcher’s, is giving Michele a caramella. His teeth will thus be filthy when the paediatrician looks in his throat.
I decide to study the expert’s answer to the case of little Francesca and notice that in more than a page and a half (for this is the ‘in-depth, case-of-the-week letter’) the word ‘spanking’ is mentioned only once, and noticeably it’s the more unpleasant word picchiare — to beat — that is used (i.e. something totally unconscionable), rather than the blander, less frightening botte (smackies).
‘Sometimes,’ the learned man says, ‘some parents get so frustrated with children like Francesca that they even hit them [his italics], and then of course they feel like “worms” for treating the child so badly and perhaps causing her a serious trauma…’
Nascimbeni no doubt would make his corna. For my own part, I can’t help thinking that while the trend away from formal discipline is clearly general across the Western world, no people is perhaps as perplexed as the Italians with the whole problem of how to make a child do what it does not want to do. Perhaps because Italian parents so rarely find any good reasons for not doing what they want to do.
‘You must,’ our expert in Donna & Mamma concludes, ‘firmly disapprove of any behaviour you think is unacceptable, even if this does not immediately give noticeable results. You must, however heart-rending it is, be willing to hear her cry…’
O la Madonna!
But ricatti, the paediatrician insists, are out. And particularly ricatti to do with food. The little girl must never be told that if she doesn’t eat something she won’t get something else. She must never be bribed…
How curious and unnatural all this is! And how comic in a society that seems to hang together above all on ricatti and a strict tit-for-tat system of favours done and returned. I accept an invitation to dinner only to be scolded by my wife because ‘Now we will have to invite them.’ My professor at the university offers me a weekday off, but then friends suggest I should not accept because ‘Then you will be obliged to do him a favour when he asks. And you don’t know what that favour is.’ My bank gives me a mortgage, but then is furious when I close my account to move it elsewhere. ‘You were ready to come to me when you needed a favour,’ the bank manager almost shouts, ‘and now you ditch me just like that. When I thought the British were so civilised!’ Michele is dispatched with a Christmas present for one of our neighbours, only to return with a ten-thousand-lire note in his hand. Disturbingly, they felt the need to discharge their debt once more.