My wife embraces her mother rapturously. And her father. Michele watches them. Everybody does seem perfectly happy and delighted to see each other. The nonni are here! Evviva! Yet Michele is surely aware, even at five, that we complain a great deal about these unannounced trips, about not knowing how long Nonno and Nonna are going to stay, about the problems that arise if we have other guests. And surely when alone with his grandparents he will have heard them levelling all kinds of criticisms against ourselves, for they are nothing if not indiscreet. Then as we sit down together at table, everybody will talk critically about Rita’s brothers, Uncle Berto here in Verona, Uncle Renato down in Rome, will complain of the former’s love of expensive clothes he can’t afford, the latter’s tendency to send his mechanic’s bills to his father. Why do these boys have to borrow so much? Why do they never pay back? Why do they apparently believe that everything is owed to them? Yet later in the evening, when Roberto arrives — orange Benetton sweater loosely tied round the collar of a Gianfranco Ferrè shirt, beautifully creased wool trousers, shoes he might even now be trying on in some expensive store in central Verona — when Roberto arrives with his fierce mane of hair and proud Roman nose, everybody will rush to give him those same rapturous embraces they recently gave each other, everybody will laugh themselves silly, hand-clapping, back-clapping, hugging and kissing. Wine will be poured and then more wine, and Nonna, almost expiring with pride at having such a tall handsome son, and a doctor to boot, will notice that there’s only a ‘finger’ left in the brandy bottle in the glass cabinet. And she will complain what poor taste it is to leave just a finger in a bottle of brandy: her grandmother always said never to leave a drop in the bottom of a bottle, it brings bad luck, though of course nothing good can be thrown out… So then she will drink the brandy herself, she feels obliged to, or she will share it round, and the grappa too, seeing as there’s some grappa, and everybody will be the best of friends, passing young Stefania from arm to arm and turning her upside down and picking Michele up to tickle him and toss him on the couch and so on, despite its being far too soon after their dinners for that kind of thing.
Yes, no doubt the children take all this in, this wonderful spettacolo of affection, this carefully choreographed festa. And perhaps somewhere deep down they are learning to associate it with the fact that they must remember to say a huge and quite extravagant thank you to Nonno when he remembers to bring them a present, albeit picked up on an exceedingly full stomach as he staggered out of his favourite auto-grill. Yes, they must put on a good show of gratitude, they must give Nonno his reward and his due, then everything will be given and forgiven them, as everything is given and forgiven to Zio Berto.
I have often wondered, in this regard, whether Italians can really appreciate a story like King Lear. Why didn’t Cordelia put on a bit more of a show for her foolish old father? Surely that was wrong of her. For there are times when a little falsehood is expected of you, and can be engaged in quite sincerely, because appearance has a value in itself, indicates, precisely, your willingness to keep up an appearance. All the world is appearance. Cordelia was wrong. Equally, those heart-breaking modern American short stories where family members finally and painfully confess to each other the sad truth about their infidelities and resentments, can mean little in Italy, where people are instinctively familiar, from the kind of childhood Michele and Stefania are now enjoying, with all that unpleasantly and inevitably underlies our getting on together. They know this, but are wise enough to put on a good show and enjoy it.
‘Don’t send the children to bed!’ Nonna protests. ‘It’s so early! How can you do that? You know, Michele, my own grandmother always used to say how important it was for children to experience the fun of being up at night. She said that if…’
The children love this. Michele, like Gigi in that condominium meeting of time ago, like children all over Italy, is helping himself to everybody’s wine, grabbing pieces of a panettone left over from Christmas. The huge brightly red box, complete with silvering and ribbon, in which this insubstantial and rather dull cake was presented, speaks tinsel worlds. Another spettacolo. When I insist it’s their bedtime and I’ve had enough of them, Nonna starts muttering about that notorious English coldness, that awful British reserve. Why can’t the children have some more cake? Why can’t they stay up? Listen to the poor things wailing! They don’t want to go to bed. It’s only nine o’clock.
But I long since learned how to get round this one. I lean over my mother-in-law’s excessively perfumed shoulders and hug her. I tell her how wonderful it is to see her again, which actually it is. Then I tell her, laughingly, lovingly, to mind her own damn business. She responds well to this. She laughs. She admires a man who can be frank and speak his mind, she says. Then she entirely forgets the children despite their tortured yells as they’re dragged away to the horror of a warm bed, and concentrates instead on telling Roberto how a doctor should behave. Because a doctor is a doctor, she suddenly announces very severely, and should cut a certain figure, even when he’s a urologist.
Roberto looks at her with blank complacency, dipping panettone in his wine. He has no idea what she is talking about. So she has to spell it out: she was appalled, yes, totally appalled, in Pescara last summer when they brought a neighbour’s relative for him to see, yes, for their son and doctor to see, about the poor man’s prostate, and he, Berto, appeared in his bathing shorts. He saw the man in his bathing shorts! What a terrible loss of face. Her grandmother, Nonna Matilda, used to say that…
There is an advert on Italian television that shows a young man in a supermarket queue buying onions, potatoes, vegetables various. The cashier, an unfashionably fleshy beauty, plumply pale under the blackest jet curls, asks the fellow if he is making a minestrone. ‘Yes,’ he admits shyly. And what a sympathetic smile the dear girl has as she leans her big breasts forward over her electronic till to tell him not to forget the leeks. No, don’t forget the leeks… Her grandmother always used to say that leeks were the secret to a good minestrone… Meanwhile, a caption floats up across vegetables, whose generous roundness is somehow underlined by proximity to those breasts, to the effect that you always get the human touch in Conad (yes, Conad) supermarkets.
So now Roberto, having to hear for the thousandth time what his mother’s grandmother may or may not have said about how doctors should behave (for it may be that ‘my grandmother said’ is only a way of lending ancestral authority to a private and self-interested opinion), Roberto shouts, ‘Sì Mamma, sì Mamma, anything you say, Mamma,’ but laughing; and just as both children return to beg a last glass of water and to go round kissing everybody again, he begins to recount a spoof of this television advert, which he has seen on some late night satirical programme.
So, in the spoof everybody in the supermarket queue begins to say what their grandmother put in her minestrone, a huge list of vegetables, some of them most unlikely, with one customer insisting, against all reason, that the real secret to a good minestrone was… watermelon. Yes, watermelon, in the minestrone. An argument flares up, while other customers who are eager to be served and to get along home begin to shout in frustration, until one woman cries out loud, ‘You know what my grandmother did? You want to know what my grandmother put in her minestrone? My grandmother pissed in her minestrone, that’s what she did.’ To which the woman’s antagonist replies, ‘And my grandmother pissed in your grandmother’s minestrone…’