At almost two Stefi chases a lizard across the floor upstairs. It must have fallen in through a skylight. Its little feet slither on the shiny surface of Righetti’s titles. Its tail curls this way and that. Wildly excited, Stefi runs straight into Rita’s desk. ‘O che capitombolo!’ I tell her, going to gather her up. She howls and shrieks. ‘O povera, povera Stefi!’ It seems I’ve converted.
In the main piazza of the village, Michele dances round the oval parapet of the fountain. It’s bright winter weather now, the light icily, harshly brilliant as it never can be in England. We’ve just come out of the pasticceria. Rita has gone off to the greengrocer who sells the best grapes. I’m sitting on a bench with Stefi in my arms under bare trees, and ‘Don’t fall in, Michele!’ I shout, ‘Don’t fall in!’ But I pride myself on not being one of those parents who frustrate their children’s desire for adventure.
Michele runs around the cheap marble waving his arms and shrieking and bending down to splash the water hooping from low jets. His blue overalls, made in Italy, announce ‘CALIFORNIA DAYS’.
‘Don’t fall in!’
Then Iacopo arrives. You can set your watch by Iacopo’s arrival at the pasticceria. He’s on a huge black motorbike today. Perhaps because he has just left his wife and child. And he says he would like me to have a coffee with him to discuss matters. How can an artist, he demands, be expected to pay much in the way of alimony? His wife comes from a rich family, they…
I’m just trying to explain that I’ve already indulged (in coffee), when there’s a splash, a big splash. Michele’s in, with the algae and the lollipop sticks, and floating litter and freezing cold. He stands there knee-deep in dazed disbelief that things really can go wrong in life. Then begins to wail. ‘Che capitombolo!’ Iacopo breathes, unusually aware of something outside of himself. For my own part, what I’m most aware of is that there is no man in greater trouble than an Italian husband who has been careless enough to let a child catch a cold. It’s far, far worse than mere desertion or problems with alimony.
Six months later, with Michele almost five and Stefi two and a half, he sits on a seat attached behind the handlebars of my bike and she on a seat on Rita’s. There is no better way to travel. Little hands flail to touch each other as we ride side by side. Little songs are sung. ‘Lele,’ Stefi shouts, ‘Stefi,’ he answers, and they love to feel the breeze on their faces. The road is flat, narrow, dusty with summer sun. Swallow shadows flit quick across the asphalt. There’s a sensible, flat green stillness about the broad landscape as it sits out another long summer day, quietly, patiently. The corn doesn’t wave, it waits. The trees are silent. Only lizards scuttle in the leaves, and sparrows perhaps. Until, round a bend, we find men by a stream, too many men, one after another: a fishing competition. Suddenly the road is lined with their cars. We slow down.
And now something’s coming up behind too. Honking. We fall quickly into single file in the narrow space. It’s the car leading a bike race. It honks furiously, as if outraged to find parked cars and other cyclists on the route. The fishermen turn annoyed from their tackle. Then they forget their own competition and begin to cheer. Forza Dino! Come on! Forza Montecchio! We have to stop. The men, young and old, sweat by with their plastic crash-helmets and fancy fluorescent pants. How they love sports equipment! How they love having the name of their team on their shirts! Pedalling harder for the spectators, they flash past in a pack and are gone. The children applaud the spettacolo. Then we’re just speeding up again ourselves into the stillness of that flat countryside, when all at once something shocking happens. All at once I’m doing a somersault in the air, quite high in the air, actually. I go up and up and over and crash down on my bicycle, Michele underneath. After three years’ perfectly happy cycling on that seat, the boy has finally decided to poke his foot between the moving spokes. We might as well have been shot from behind.
The casualty ward, when a car gets us there, has a children’s section. They’re very kind. They make no criticism or comment. A dozen of these accidents a day. All Italians carry their children on bikes and mopeds and scooters. What better way to see the world! They put a couple of stitches in Michele’s leg. He screams, despite local anaesthetics. Nobody tells him to be a man. But the nurse shakes her head. ‘Che capitombolo,’ she tells him indulgently.
When they’re not off on a trip, after ice creams, or on biking expeditions, the children are naked in summer. They spend far more time naked than an English child ever could, and naked without shivering. Does this kind of thing really influence the character as much as one suspects it might?
Michele and Stefi roll about naked on a sheet on the tiles in the sitting room. They are naked on the lawn in a paddling pool while Rita pours buckets of water on them from twenty feet above. Giovanni joins in. And Gigi and little Martino, Giorgio’s son, and Gianluca, Mario’s little boy. Gianluca’s Serbian babysitter, who arrived to escape the war, stands and watches in a garden transformed from rubble to the lush pages of a magazine, the inverse process of what is happening in her country.
The children are naked, too, on our annual holiday in Pescara, where the toddling Stefi kneels in the great stone sink outside the house and showers herself with cold water under a fierce sun. They are naked at night in bed under a thin sheet. Too naked now. For one of the characteristic sounds of their childhood must be the dreadful whine of the mosquito over their fragrantly plump bodies. Zanzara, the Italian word for the beast, is more onomatopoeic, as befits a language historically closer to the menace. The children’s smooth brown nakedness is broken by the great red blotches of mosquito bites. How angry it makes them when they’re irritated with the heat! They scream for you to shut the windows, shut the doors. Despite the suffocating closeness. Then, ‘Papà, Papà, there’s a zanzara in the room! Come and kill it!’ I come in and perform with a copy of Io e il mio bambino. Righetti’s whitewashed wall has tiny blotches of blood. I wonder how my old friends Stefano and Marta get round this one, how do they keep those walls so free of fingerprints and blood?
In the middle of the night there’s a terrific bang and scream. Michele has tried to imitate Papà. Climbing naked over the furniture, brandishing a toy catalogue, he has crashlanded in his Duplo. Its sharp corners and little studs are printed all over his naked body. Like the grappa drinkers in the bar and the nun in San Zeno and the nurse at the casualty ward, Stefi rushes to help, and she wails: ‘Lele, Lele, che ca-i-omolo!’