‘We had a picnic with Papà last week,’ he says.
This is true. The temperature in November can be very mild, even warm at midday when the sun is high in a paper-blue sky, then suddenly freezing in the evening when you have to stand around watching your kids play football, or skate, or ride their bicycles round the BMX track.
Michele ponders. Mamma is right. People don’t go fishing so much in winter. So perhaps he could try horse riding. ‘Beppe’s started horse riding,’ he says. ‘And he’s got everything. The jodhpurs, the boots, the helmet, even the whip. Perhaps I could ask Santa Lucia for those.’
Has or has not Michele grasped the idea of the richer categories of professions yet? I thought he had. When complaining that Beppe had gone off to the mountains one week to learn how to ski, I did hear him say to Gigi downstairs: ‘But then his father’s an accountant. Accountants can do anything.’ Yes, I think he has grasped that. So is it that he doesn’t realise how much jodhpurs, boots, helmet, whip and, of course, riding lessons cost, or is it that he imagines there’s no limit to Santa Lucia’s purse? But then he did write, ‘if onehundredandtwentythousand lire is not too much…’ Perhaps everything hangs on whether he does or does not believe deep down that Santa Lucia exists.
‘Look, if a fishing rod’s what you really want,’ Rita decides to stay on the safe side, ‘ask Santa Lucia for that. After all, it will always keep till spring…’
The truth is that Michele is going through something of a crisis with regards to the existence or otherwise of the blessed saint. Some of the boys at school have insisted that it really is just their parents bringing the presents. Indeed, their parents, perhaps eager to exact gratitude, since it’s galling past a certain point to have the children thanking the wrong person, have told them so. These kids know the score, and they laugh when Michele gets angry about it and says on the contrary he knows Santa Lucia exists. How does he know? Partly because his mamma says she does, and partly because when he got up in the middle of the night to do a wee last year he caught a glimpse of her shadow behind the window. She was just like in the pictures, tall and dressed in a long white robe with a crown on her head. The other boys laugh at him. He, being bigger, hits them. The funny thing is that they laugh at Michele for not believing in God and hell, not believing in visions of the Madonna and the secrets of Fatima, and here they are laughing at him again for believing in something much more pleasant and attractive, and in the end hardly more far-fetched: that a phantom saint travels about on her mule on a December night carrying presents to all the little boys and girls.
At the school gate one evening Michele sheepishly tells Rita that Maestra Elena wants to see her, immediately. Inside the classroom, the teacher makes the boy wait outside. Apparently she had to intervene to stop Michele punching and kicking two other boys. Protesting at being sent out of class, he demanded confirmation from her as to the existence of Santa Lucia. The boys had been taunting him for believing…
What did she tell him? Rita asked. This is getting to be a major issue. We don’t know how to behave.
Maestra Elena smiles. She has a lot of experience in this kind of thing. She told him if he believed in it all, then it would come true, and if he didn’t believe in it, then his parents would give him toys instead of Santa Lucia.
One can’t help admiring the dexterity of a can’t-lose formulation like this, the kind of thing that sanctions more or less any combination of belief and disbelief, that will later allow a person to believe that contraception is murder, but only for those who believe it is murder; the Pope is infallible, even when he’s wrong for me, etc. In this particular case the solution allows Michele to go on writing some heartfelt last-minute letters to Santa Lucia…
The great day approaches. The children adjust their requirements and become painstakingly specific: the pushchair before the highchair for Carabambola, if it’s got to be one or the other; a ten-kilo line and trout tackle, if possible.
They place their letters, carefully folded, on the sill outside the window, where the tooth fairy leaves ten-thousand-lire notes (Alessandro Volta) whenever appropriate. The paper doesn’t blow away because the shutters are closed. During the night Santa Lucia comes along, somehow opens the shutters from the outside (the scenario my neighbours always fear), removes the letters and, on the last few nights before the big day, replaces them with chocolates. Immediately on waking the children rush through a mess of toys to the window…
One day the good saint forgets. ‘Papà, Papà, the letter’s still there!’ Oh no! I force myself out of sleep, Michele’s going to have another crisis of faith. But I’m thinking quickly today. I sit up in bed. ‘You must have been naughty, Michele.’ ‘No, I wasn’t.’ ‘Oh, but I was,’ wails Stefi. We remember she threw a knife across the table yesterday and broke a glass. Santa Lucia’s credibility rating soars. Immediately, I feel guilty for having reinforced the notion of divine (semidivine) retribution. Stefi is now begging Michele’s forgiveness. She’s even offering to put her next pocket money in with his.
Anyway, the following night we’re back on duty again, substituting (how often one’s obliged to do this one way or another) for the absent supernatural. Or rather, Rita is. Inevitably it’s le mamme who do all these things, who open the window, remove the letters, then store them in some hiding place for memorabilia, along with Stefi’s old handprints and an assortment of milk teeth and drawings of princes and princesses and fast cars with bazookas and MAMATIVOLIOBENEANCEQANDOFACIOLACATIVA.
So it’s appropriate really that Santa Lucia, distributor of presents, should be a woman, and I really can’t understand why the good lady doesn’t hold sway in the whole of Italy, but limits her largesse to the Veneto. Babbo Natale — Father Christmas — fat and jolly with his white beard and tasteless red outfit, is such a conspicuously northern import, less Italian somehow than the marocchini or the slogan on Stefi’s new winter jacket (made in Vicenza) that says, in English, ‘BIG OUTSIDE’. Why should we have reindeer in what is patently mule country?
Then because Santa Lucia is only a local saint, when the great day comes, the children have to go to school just the same. It’s as if an English child had to go to school on Christmas Day because the national religion were Hindu or something. They wake desperately early and rush to open their presents, which Santa Lucia leaves in the sitting room despite the absence of chimney or any possible entrance through the heavy shutters, not to mention the automatic gate. This year the saint has been attentive to their demands. There’s a box with all you need to see off a shoal of trout, and Carabambola comes with both highchair and pushchair. Come si deve. Then it’s breakfast and straight off to school.
It’s interesting that this business of Santa Lucia’s being local doesn’t seem to be instrumental in shaking Michele’s faith. He doesn’t ask himself why she has such a highly developed sense of regionalism, the way churchfolk never wonder why the Madonna just will not appear to Tibetans. Perhaps all those roadside shrines have prepared him for the locally divine. Santa Lucia has power… here!
Still, that old spoilsport, reason, does get the boy to the truth in the end. Reason and, as it turns out, Zia, who is anything but a spoilsport. For on the evening of December 13th Zia Natalina is there at the school gate to give the children Santa Lucia presents of her own: a compendium of boardgames for both, an aeroplane kit for Michele, a cosmetics set — lipsticks, eyeshadows, powders — for the six-year-old Stefi. She’s enthralled. I’m appalled. Especially when the gift comes from this woman who’s always complaining about younger women running off with older men. But Michele returns home thoughtful.