For now, right in the middle of a useful discussion as to which plants must go where and when, Giovanni suddenly starts throwing the small metal cars at the other boys and then at us. Silvio shouts, ‘Smettila!’ Giovanni ignores him. Silvio, a big muscular man who has been considering renting one of the semi-basement cellars in the condominium to set up a little gym for himself and his dumbbells, threatens, in fierce dialect, to hit the boy. Giovanni ignores him. Then, giggling satanically, the boy pulls his pants down and makes to pee on the lawn no more than a couple of yards away.
Somebody laughs.
Silvio shouts, ‘Ti farò a pezzi!’ I’ll chop you in bits. But despite this fighting talk, so far from the tone of Donna & Mamma, he still hasn’t moved from his elegantly striped chair. Giovanni pees, with that glorious golden trajectory infants have, pointing his pistolino, as they say here, up to the sky.
More laughter.
‘Good fertiliser,’ Mario says, lips dripping with olive oil. ‘No danger of burning out the tree roots.’
‘Well, I never,’ Silvio protests. ‘What can you do with a kid like that?’ Clearly, he’s somewhat embarrassed by his impotence, yet at the same time perversely proud of his child’s boldness. Looking round at the rest of us, his face seems to protest that he did everything possible. Meanwhile, Sabrina goes over to the boy and scolds him quietly. Giovanni scampers off giggling.
Then, just as the shadows are lengthening and the barbecue flames are brightening and the glass of wine I’ve drunk is beginning to take a few corners off the world, as Stefania finally nods off for a few moments and Silvio insists that Rita try a piece of sizzled sausage, Mario reopens the whole question of the automatic gate. He has checked with a company that produces a totally child-safe gate with light-sensitive trigger devices on both sides, so that it can never close if something is there. Never. The mechanism costs only two million lire, over and above the three million for the basic system, plus sixty thousand each for the remote controls.
His timing is perfect. What with the hospitality we have just accepted putting us in a weak position (ricatto), the pleasantness of the early evening, a general desire to please these generous people, and perhaps a new feeling that maybe if a child or two does have a close call with the gate that might not be a bad thing after all, Rita and I suddenly don’t feel like fighting a serious battle over this one. Especially when it comes out that the others have already enlisted Marcello on their side and are thus four against two. Rita, however, astutely feels that capitulation on our part should not come without concession. She suggests that since we have only one car and one garage, while they all have two, we should not pay more than a sixth of the price for the gate, despite having one of the two bigger apartments. With their Italian flair for compromise, and perhaps even imagining that this was our only reason for objecting to the project in the first place, Silvio and Mario accept at once, so that all things considered, it’s not quite clear who has blackmailed whom. In any event, everybody clinks glasses while the children are mildly told off for getting their clothes dirty.
A couple of weeks later, Michele tugs me by the hand and leads me to his little bedroom, whose window looks over the back of the house and the individual gardens (as opposed to the big communal garden round the side of the house). What he wants to show me is that a barbecue has appeared on Mario’s patch at the top of the territory, a barbecue identical to Silvio’s barbecue and arranged, as regards positioning and orientation, in exactly the same way. A month later it will be Marcello, who, though he still hasn’t moved into his apartment, has a third barbecue appear exactly midway between the other two.
So the charnel-house pattern spreads outward. So the children learn the importance of having what other people have. Michele thinks it is wonderful. He loves barbecues. But when is Papà going to get one?
And when is Papà going to get a TV?
When is Papà going to get a mountain bike?
Plenty of chance for ricatti here.
Wiser than Donna & Mamma my Frate Indovino, a sort of calendar cum almanac, says:
‘Your son. From nought to five he is your master, from five to ten your servant, from ten to fifteen your secret counsellor, and after that, your friend — or your enemy.’
Well, I can’t wait until Michele’s five.
Alto Adige
One year, and still Stefania not only wasn’t sleeping but was still keeping us awake all night. Our paediatrician now suggested a trip to the mountains. The fresh air at a thousand metres and more was supposed to work wonders for a child’s sleep. All our neighbours confirmed this, were surprised we hadn’t gone up there before. So photographs show us blearily pushing a pram on the high plateau of the Alpe di Siusi in Alto Adige, a hundred miles to the north, with Michele sitting on my shoulders or clutching his mother’s coat.
Alto Adige is officially part of Italy, but nowhere could be less Italian. The men wear lederhosen over bony knees and have feathers in felt hats. The women have round, rosy, weather-beaten faces. Orange or pink geraniums, but never both, adorn every wooden balcony, banks and banks of them, in rigidly straight lines. The cobbles are carefully swept. The gates are wooden, and the fences are wooden, and the tables in the bars are wooden, and the road signs likewise. Indeed, if anything can be made of wood, it will be. And if they make a pizza here, they make it with speck, or sausage, not aubergines or artichokes. Ethnically, they’re German. They speak German. They call the place the Südtirol. One evening something happened here that had to do with Stefi’s not sleeping, something that reminded me how different the Italians are from the Germans, and how tolerant, both to babies who won’t sleep, and to parents suffering from babies who won’t sleep.
It was March. Easter. In the afternoon we had taken a ride on a horse-drawn sleigh up on the glacier. They give you blankets for your laps, and we held Stefi between us while Michele sat up front beside the old peasant driver and the horse heaved us through a wonderfully slanting sunshine that sparkled off snow cliffs and turned meadows thousands of feet below to carpets of green gold. Stefi howled the whole way. And howled likewise in the crowded restaurant afterwards, where Michele fell off his chair twice, taking a plate of dumplings with him on the second attempt. Winding up my strudel, I became aware that I was rapidly reaching that point where accumulated tiredness turns into bad temper. Another few minutes and I would do something crazy. In desperation I decided a little indulgence might still save the day, and went and bought a pack of cigarettes. I must say I do this only rarely and only, for reasons I have never understood, when I am away from home. The children still whining, I lit up, deliciously, over coffee and a grappa. Likewise Rita.
We had been enjoying the smoke, nicotine and sundry poisons for about ten seconds, when to my shock and surprise a huge fat woman on her way out suddenly addressed us in demotic Italian: we should be ashamed of ourselves, she said fiercely, ashamed of ourselves, smoking in the presence of our children! The lady’s accent was of the Teutonic variety unlikely to endear itself to anyone born south of Trento. What’s more, there was a definite suggestion of racial superiority in her tone, as if those of German descent would never smoke anywhere near a young child. Her face, after she’d finished speaking, had a frightening severity to it. She didn’t move on but just stared at us, apparently demanding a response. Nor did she try to make her attack more palatable by smiling at Michele or cooing over Stefi, as some elderly Italian bigot might, just told us straight, and she repeated her complaint, that we were behaving badly.