I lost my temper. In an extravagant and quite unforgiveable fit of rage, I shrieked at the woman that I was smoking because of the children, I was smoking because they were making my life impossible, because they refused to sleep, because I myself hadn’t slept for months. For months. For months! Did she understand? Could she even conceive what that meant? And I said that if anybody else came and bothered me about it, I would only smoke all the more. Indeed, I would smoke a million cigarettes tonight if she didn’t mind her own damn business.
The woman was not at all put off by this lamentable loss of self-control, as if she expected no better from someone she imagined to be Italian. If my children didn’t sleep, she told me, still speaking in the same clipped, hectoring tones, it was because I spoilt them. I should leave them to cry, she explained. For however long it took. It would be a far kinder thing than blowing cigarette smoke all over them.
This time I didn’t reply but grimly lit another cigarette, blowing the smoke quite definitely in her direction. She turned and left, speaking loud words to her husband, and one of those words was italienische, which set off a murmur of voices from the tables around us. Appropriately, Stefi howled. For perhaps the first time I was grateful for it.
Children, Rita remarked when the woman was gone, were perhaps healthier in German-speaking countries, but certainly sadder. For my own part, I was somewhat consoled by the fact that I had actually been mistaken for an Italian, if only by a non-native speaker. Or perhaps it was just that after a good argument I felt more relaxed. Ready for another night in bianco, with ‘Lullaby, lullaby, Who shall I give my baby to…’
For neither the fresh air of the mountains nor a whiff of tobacco smoke had had any effect at all on Stefi.
Breaking off her crooning in the dead of night, Rita laughed, ‘I know who we should give her to!’
Who? Was she hallucinating angels?
‘The German befana in the restaurant.’ The old witch. ‘We should let her try and babysit Stefi for a night.’
But for all her difficulties we cared for our dear daughter far too much to abandon her to such a formidable figure. Though I remember we did once try to leave the little girl to cry, giving up after perhaps half an hour of constant yelling. Exactly one year and nine months after our daughter was born, Rita noted in her diary: ‘Stefi sleeps four hours without break. First time…’
Capitomboli
When English children begin to crawl they find carpets on the floor, carelessly turned up at the corners. They find walls soft with wallpaper, thick curtains they can haul themselves up on, deep sofas smothered in cushions, big quilts on top of the bed, fluff and dustballs beneath. The English domestic world is a soft, soft place. Perhaps there is a hearthrug. Perhaps there is a cat or a dog on the rug. The child moves from one softness to another.
When Italian children begin to crawl they find tiles, or at best polished wood. Carpets are too hot for hot summers and unhygienic. Every day a wet cloth spreads disinfectant on shiny ceramics. There is no soft paper on the walls but rough whitewash, or solid waxed stucco, which is the fashion now. The stairs to the outer world are polished stone. The windows are shuttered. It’s a harder, cleaner, smoother, more controlled environment, bright by day, jet dark at night. With the shutters tight, no shadows flit softly about the curtain hem. Bang your head on the window ledge and you find marble. Take a tumble, or capitombolo, as they say here, on ceramics and the bruises go deep.
At six months Stefi manages to roll off her changing table… and cries for hours. At ten months she is discovering how many sharp edges Righetti built into his stylish spiral staircase. The small balcony tiles, our builder assured us, were baked specially hard to resist the fiercest heat, to stay cool. But when a tiny girl pulls herself up on the railing, she soon finds that the metal is scorching. In honour of Nascimbeni she tosses all her toys down between the bars, but never manages to hit anyone. Only gloomy Francesca in the apartment below complains about finding Pinocchio and Topo Gigio and an incongruous Big Bird amongst the underwear she hangs out from the balcony on a projecting clothes horse.
Hard surfaces make for hard noises. Windows opened in sultry heat suddenly bang when the sirocco rises. A loose shutter rattles. Reaching up to swing on a door, one-year-old Stefi finds it’s stuck. The handle behind is tied with a handbag strap to the coat hanger to stop it slamming, to let the blessed breeze pass through the house. The bathroom door is tied to a dressing gown on a peg. The air stirs in the house, bringing with it the shrill cries of Gigi and Giovanni and Michele, shouting at each other from respective balconies, then Stefi’s shriek when a door suddenly gives and her head crashes back on the tiles. ‘O che capitombolo!’ echoes Mother’s voice. What a tumble that was!
Through the afternoon dropped toys and wooden bricks ring on the ceramics. When a child rolls a wooden ball at skittles in some other apartment the noise is of distant thunder, then comes the explosion if the ball’s on target. Outside, the harsh drone of the cicalas is as compact as waxed stucco. And after twilight the jarring trill of the crickets… Oh, for the soft tinkle of the ice cream van in a mild London suburb!
I take the children to the bar for ice creams. At eighteen months, Stefi is remarkably precocious in the handling of pistacchio and stracciatella. Michele still gets his zabaione all over his pudding face. On the tables round about young men and old are drinking beer and wine and grappa. Michele tries mine sometimes, a sip now and then, a little gulp. There will be no momentous initiation into the world of alcohol for these children, as when my friends and I first ventured into pubs to get the oldest-looking amongst us to buy a beer. There is no mystique to drinking here. Which is perhaps why so many of the young people are still tamely swallowing Coke and Fanta. They tried Papà’s beer and didn’t like it.
Leaving the bar, Stefi trips on the base of a sunshade and goes down on her face. At least a dozen people rush to lift her up, men and women alike. And O che capitombolo! Che povera povera piccina! Poor little thing! They’re so sure she’s hurt herself, the girl wails in fright.
In town the big churches offer occasional protection from the heat. They have the same gloom the house has when you half close shutters against direct sunlight. They have the same hard surfaces, the stone floor, stone steps, the same sudden sharp sounds when a sacristan starts to move some chairs, when an elegant woman’s heels scrape as she genuflects. After all, there is a lot in common between casa and chiesa. Both are sacred. I have seen Marta polish the parapet of her balcony with the same sacrificial intensity of the old women who bring out the shine on the altar rail here in San Zeno. Certainly, Stefano decants his home-bottled wine with more reverence than the acolytes who carry the Host. Here the drone of the cicalas is replaced by the monotone of a priest reading some special Mass in a side chapel. Apparently for one long dead. I try to get Michele to behave, to show respect, to just sit and enjoy the cool, but suddenly he hoists himself up on the baptismal font to get a look inside, and, slipping on the smooth stone, catches his chin, bites his tongue, falls. A nun rushes from her prayers. O povero povero bambino! The boy wails even louder. The sympathy grows correspondingly. O povero piccolino! Now Michele’s howl fills the huge church. Then Stefi cries, imagining something awful has happened to her Lele, as she calls him. They make an incredible noise. But nobody complains. Neither the huddle in the little side chapel, nor the old women kneeling. Nobody tries to hush them, as I suspect the good folk would if we were in the Südtirol. No, it’s I who attract frowns of disapproval when I insist the boy get back on his feet again and pull himself together, when I tell him how silly it was to go climbing up the font. Only after I had been in Italy a very long time did I begin to appreciate that weeping is something to be savoured rather than curtailed. There is so much quality in a child’s tears.