The word nido means nest, but in recent years it has come to mean the first of two levels of state nursery schools, the one going from age six months to three years. I remember being amazed when I heard about the nido. It seemed so marvellous that there was a place where one’s child would be fed, changed and looked after from eight in the morning till four in the evening. True there were fees to be paid, but they were modest. I could not believe how bountiful the state was proving to be. The only problem, I then discovered, was that the number of places was limited.
We applied — this is going back to when Michele was about a year old — hoping to have at least the morning free to work. As so often in Italy, there was no pre-printed form, but Rita wrote a letter on expensively stamped legal paper and backed it up with the necessary certificates (of residency, of family relationships, of birth, of marriage, etc.) plus copies of our recent tax declaration. Soon afterwards a man came round to our house and asked searching questions about how many hours I worked at the university, questions to which I answered truthfully. He was polite but clearly looking for trouble, eyeing all around him, which in that particular apartment, before we moved to Righetti’s empire, amounted to no more than great icebergs of ugly fifties furniture frozen in a time unlikely to be remembered for its sense of grace, or even practicality. How big was the apartment, he asked, how many rooms were there, what kind of car did I have? His face was discouraging, sceptical. Clearly every answer was the wrong answer. Did I have a VAT number? he asked. I said I did. But this apparently was an indicator of wealth, rather than a token of bondage, and likewise the fact that we were renting furnished accommodation, since rents are high.
In any event, we were refused a place. Apparently, we earnt too much money and we spent a lot of our time working at home. But our real crime, as Stefano with his experience of accountancy explained, was that we were self-employed. What we should have done was start a company and then be employees of ourselves. He tapped his nose. ‘Sai com’è?’ he said. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a self-employed worker to get his child into a state nursery.’ He laughed. Young Beppe was spending his pre-school days with his grandmother.
Is it worth going into this admission process in just a little more detail? I think so, if only to appreciate the tendency the Italian authorities have of offering everybody a prize (to endear themselves to the electorate) and then, since they can’t actually afford to give it to everybody, setting up a maze, or obstacle race, to make sure that only those who really haggle for it (not those who need it) actually get it. It’s a mentality every Italian child will one day have to learn to react to, a touchstone situation around which many a personality will form, especially at that critical moment when young people leave school and have to fend for themselves. The question is, are you willing to fight for your gravy train, or aren’t you?
Back to the nido. Inevitably, there is a points system, in order to establish a graduatoria, i.e. a hierarchy of entitlement, a waiting list, or perhaps more simply a pecking order. Equally inevitably, the exact way in which points are allotted is obscure. The truth is that volumes could be written on the various graduatorie in Italian society — to get into a college hostel, to get a low-interest mortagage, a place in a housing project, a job. This very day I read an article on a graduatoria establishing the order in which, in a little village down south, those who have suffered the ignominy of being buried in the ground (considered plebeian) can expect to be shifted into loculi — grave niches in the wall — as soon as places become available in the municipal cemetery. A row has been sparked off because many of the relatives of the dear but ill-treated departed fear that the points system is being abused in order to favour people — corpses or their relatives? — with political contacts in the local authorities.
As for the nido’s points system, I never met anyone who understood exactly how it worked. Questions are asked about whether one’s parents were refugees from Fiume (the area of Italy returned to Yugoslavia in 1947), or war orphans, and clearly these are extremely advantageous positions to be in. Bizarre anachronisms aside, however, it in no secret that there are points for being a dipendente, an employee, and above all for being a statale, a state employee. Logically, the state looks after the child in order to be able to count on the presence at work of the parents. Not for nothing is the state often referred to here as mamma stato…
Desperately behind with deadlines, when Michele was perhaps eighteen months, Rita wrote a long letter to the selection committee for the local nurseries. She pointed out that it is impossible to translate with a child crawling over your typewriter. She remarked that work was work whether it happened at home or not. She drew their attention to the fact that we had no relatives in the immediate vicinity and that the income tax declaration we had showed them did not demonstrate excessive wealth; evasion could not just be assumed.
Eventually we got a reply, which came as rather a surprise, saying that our case had been reconsidered and we were now on the graduatoria for the four nidos in the area, albeit around number twenty-something of those excluded. There is always room in Italy for the special case. It is always worth screaming and making a noise, as most children know so well. All the same, we suspected that number twenty-something was as good as total exclusion.
We were wrong. Less than a month later we were already being offered a place, not in the local nido but in the bigger nearby suburb of San Michele, an ugly ribbon development along the road and railway running east from Verona to Vicenza. The speed with which twenty people had come off that waiting list should perhaps have warned us. For it meant that twenty children had been withdrawn. As it was, we accepted gratefully, even thought of ourselves as having scored a little victory.
The drive from Montecchio to San Michele is about seven kilometres. You leave the vaguely scenic village set off by steep hills, even mountains when the weather is clear; there’s the picturesque castello on the hillside to your right and one or two attractive villas with iron gates and ivy and wisteria. But as you turn left and south away from the hills, the scenery changes. On the right now is the long, high wall of a barracks, to the left the grey geometry of a top-security prison. Finally, the last glimpses of country give way to the most amorphous of suburban landscapes: interminable apartment blocks that all share the same fittings, the same mass-produced memories of nobler marbles and woods, while on the street outside, as outside Stefano’s house, the pavements are still unlaid, the weeds growing tall.
The nursery is a low prefab opposite a building site. Dropping-off time in the morning is from seven-thirty on, but most parents arrive, bleary-eyed, around eight. You are greeted by a girl, who ‘welcomes the baby’. She is not one of the senior staff, who will arrive only towards nine; she is a new and raw recruit. The girl takes a baby and smiles as she wrestles with it, inviting, begging, the mother to leave. Babies stop crying when their mothers are actually gone, she insists. But the mother, carefully made up, in fur coat and high heels (did the means inspector notice these things?), can’t bring herself to walk out on a crying child. Then another baby is brought in. The girl is supposed to welcome this child as well. And there is a two-year-old being led in by a man in a leather jacket, both of them sneezing fiercely. The girl is supposed to interview this man and ascertain whether it really is wise for him to leave his sneezing and doubtless infectious infant at a nursery full of tiny tots. But she is overwhelmed, she doesn’t know where to turn.