No sooner, then, have I got to know the handsome Silvio and his equally handsome little boy, Giovanni, than I begin to see the little lad all around the village with his grandmother, most notably in the play area at Primo Maggio, the ex-Communist social club, where, even at four, the boy will still be forbidden to use either the slide or the bigger of the climbing frames, but will always able to get Nonna to buy him a lolly. ‘Still pees in his bed at night,’ she confides to me. ‘Just like his papà, oh you wouldn’t believe for how long. Eighteen or nineteen years old he was before he stopped.’ Having established her maternal authority over the little boys of two generations, she smiles fondly. Then shouts: ‘Smettila, Giovà, you’ll get your trousers dirty!’
But Granny’s condescension aside, how I envy little Giovanni’s parents! Having dropped off their boy with Nonna, they are setting off for a pleasant game of tennis at the local sports club, while I have to watch Michele losing his temper because there’s something he can’t do on the climbing frame and Stefi crying because she’s banged her head on the slide.
Likewise, no sooner have I got to know Giorgio and Donatella, who have the apartment next to ours, a chubbily pleasant and supremely relaxed couple if ever there was one, than I begin to recognise the happy grandparents on her side who arrive daily to carry off little Martino for the day while our neighbours go off to work, and the happy grandparents on his side who arrive in the evening (rarely without a new toy) to look after darling Martino while they go out for a drink, or even while they stay in and watch TV. Again, how I envy these two, who, like the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century, appear to have discovered, rediscovered, the ideal method for bringing up children: having someone else bring them up for you. It was the dream expressed in the lullaby after all. Indeed, the modern Italian seems to have gone one better than the old French artistocracy in having chosen for the delicate task the most reliable servants in the world: those responsible for their own upbringing (with the not inconsiderable advantage that they don’t have to pay them anything for it). One only fears that if ever they (my generation) have to look after their own grandchildren, they won’t be equipped for it, having had so little experience. No, when it comes to parenthood, the younger generation will be out there on their own, reinventing the wheel all over again.
But most of all I envy Silvio and Sabrina, Giorgio and Donatella, because all our relatives, Rita’s and mine, are either in England or in Pescara, or dead. In any event, unavailable. Consequently, I very often, and especially in the first sleepless months of Stefi’s life, would find myself typing with a cot on the desk beside me or, later, with a child crawling on the cold tiles round my feet; and one disastrous day when I myself had simply fallen asleep over the keyboard, I woke to find that a bottle of ink had been poured over a freshly printed typescript. ‘Where,’ I cried, ‘where are those nonni?’
I wasn’t quite the only one in Italy suffering this plight. Turning on the radio one fraught morning, I hear the presenter announcing a phone-in entitled ‘Intergenerational Solidarity and the Unnatural Grandparent’. Who would not listen to such a programme? What it turned out to be, however, was no more than an invitation to call up a group of ‘experts’ and complain of grandparents who were not doing what was expected of them, not, that is, writing cloying letters to their newborn grandchildren or arriving with proper regularity in their little Fiats so that their own children could drive off in their BMWs.
Almost immediately an outraged voice was on the line from somewhere like Ravenna or Cesena: ‘But since we’ve had the child, you understand, after all that was said beforehand, since we’ve actually had the child, I mean, they, my parents, have only offered to babysit, what, twice in two years, and they absolutely refuse to keep him while I’m out at work…’ The presenter and his panel are duly shocked. The legal specialist in particular informs us that a recent ground-breaking court ruling has established that grandparents have the legal right to see their grandchildren even if the parents don’t wish them to. This demonstrates the importance of the grandparent-grandchild bond and the unnaturalness of those who neglect it. For where there is a right, says the expert, there is inevitably a duty, too.
Someone phones to say that her mother will look after the grandchild but then perversely refuses to change him. As a result, she feels cruel leaving the little boy with his grandmother for more than, say, a couple of hours.
‘We could phone in ourselves,’ I suggest to Rita. ‘Surely there must be some law that denies grandparents the right to live more than twenty miles away from their grandchildren.’
From her position on the sofa Rita opens one comatose eye. ‘You hate it when they come,’ she says.
She’s right…
Fare festa
Imagine a dull afternoon late February. The doorbell makes you jump. You pick up the intercom, ready to tell the Jehovah’s Witnesses that you don’t want to discuss the end of the world, you believe it happened long ago. Or it could be Righetti, who has a way of turning up at the most inappropriate moments asking for that rent on his garage, which was supposed to be a mere formality but now turns out to be deadly serious, especially since we’re now supposed to buy the thing but can’t afford to. Far from keeping the price steady, as pledged, he has increased it in line with the general property boom, naturalmente. We forgot to get him to write something down. He claims never to have made any such promise.
The intercom crackles, but no one is there. ‘Chi è? Chi è?’ Nobody. Children mucking around, you think, more relieved than angry. You’re just putting the thing down when from far away a voice calls ‘It’s us!’ Because what my in-laws do is get out of the car and ring the bell, to get gate and door buzzed open, then go back to the car to unpack. But this is also a call for help. They will have lots and lots of things to carry…
I run down with Michele, now five years old, perhaps, clumsily quick and wildly excited at the prospect of an unannounced visit from those great, if only occasional, benefactors, his grandparents. Outside a freezing twilight is stiffening to fog. The garden is a huge trench because, after repeated flooding, a solemn condominium meeting decided to link all the drainpipes from the gutters to the central sewage system. This is illegal for some reason I don’t understand, but common practice, not to worry.
Nonno Adelmo, my father-in-law, drives an ancient Ford Fiesta, bought second-hand when he and Nonna Maria returned to Italy to retire some years ago. Despite boasting that this remarkable car has done more than three hundred thousand kilometres, Nonno would clearly like something more comfortable. Nonna, however, still lives in a post-war mentality where things that work have to be made to go on working, and on and on and on, just as food on the plate has to be finished, not thrown away, and just as the rather unattractive fruit from the old trees they have on their acre of land in Pescara has to be gathered, to the very last sour plum and pippy grape, and given to friends and relatives and even the merest acquaintances. So as well as having to drive an ancient car, Nonno now has to fiddle in the back of it to tug out two big crates of homemade jams — fig, apricot, and medlar — plus bottle upon bottle of laboriously prepared tomato preserve for pasta.