But I’m overdoing it here. Michele can’t understand what I’m talking about.
Look, I tell him. Lots of people think the Italian football trainer Arrigo Sacchi is incompetent, non bravo. If Italy win, they won’t say so. They’ll say he’s bravo. But if Italy lose, especially if they lose tonight against a team like Nigeria, then everybody is always and forever going to say he is incompetent, even if he wasn’t.
How almost fateful those words were!
And how speaking of the devil can conjure him up! Not Luigi Cadorna, fortunately, nor Arrigo Sacchi, but Nonno. For when we return we find him sitting under a battered sunshade on the edge of the savannah reading a letter. Nonna is in the deep grass making little jumps at the fig trees. As always their appearance is unannounced and unexpected. They weren’t able, they had said, to be back during our holiday.
There are the usual extravagant embraces, expressions of undying affection, of admiration at how wonderful everyone looks, and it occurs to me that, as with the strict routine of almost every aspect of Italian life (and this holiday has been no exception), so this predictable and required theatricality is another way of helping people to live well. Never is it easier to be oneself and relaxed about it than when you know exactly what is expected of you. There is so little that has to be decided here, either in what you do or how you do it: you take the kids to the beach early to get the healthiest of the day, you shout at them and smother them in affection, you have your pizzetta and aperitivo at 11.30, the shadows move in precise ellipses round the sunshades, you embrace your mother-in-law warmly.
‘Oh, Tim,’ she lies. ‘You’re my favourite son.’
Leaving me with a bowl of fresh figs, Nonna takes the kids off through the deep grass to find where the chickens have laid their eggs. She wears a battered straw hat, a wide skirt, a T-shirt. At seventy, there is still something girlish, certainly capricious, about her. The way she walks you’d say she romps. The children romp after her. ‘Nonnina, Nonnina!’ they cry. She turns and caresses them again and hugs them and ruffles their hair and pinches their golden skin and says how much she’d like to eat them alive — her nonna always used to say that, I’ll eat you alive — and how sorry she is they couldn’t be here during our holiday, but they had to look after — surprise, surprise — a sick relative. Now where has that silly pìopìo laid its eggs. Silly chick chocks. Her nonna always said chickens could be intelligent, but never when it came to laying their eggs. Where can they have put them? Antonietta, I notice, has retired to the crack between her shutters.
I go and sit with Nonno. He wears khaki shorts and shirt, revealing his fat, freckled legs, his fat, freckled chest. The buttons are straining. A hat, even more battered than his wife’s, is tipped back on a round, freckled forehead. He pours liberally from a supermarket carton of table wine, lights a Camel Light. I realise he is upset about something.
What?
‘Children. Oh, children, caro mio,’ he says. ‘What else.’ He tips back his hat even further. ‘You’re crazy having another,’ he says frankly. ‘Crazy.’ He shakes his head.
I point out that he had three.
The rotation of the headshake increases and seems all the more impressive since the man has no neck. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t crazy.’
I wait. The fact is that Nonno loves mysteries. He loves setting you up, then not telling you things. Retaining an area of independent operation is an important principle for the Italian male. Nobody, for example, has ever known the extent of my father-in-law’s income or bank balance. No one ever knows where he goes when he goes on a trip. It’s not unlike the question of Lucia’s virginity.
I decide we will call our next child Lucia, since we know it will be a girl. If Rita agrees. Lucia is a lovely name. She’ll have her saint’s day when the presents get handed out…
When I have the patience not to ask any questions, but just to accept some wine and a cigarette, he finally says: ‘In my case though there were mitigating circumstances.’
What is all this about? His short trousers, I notice, round his huge girth, have a tag proclaiming the brand name: Old Dog.
‘In the sense,’ he reflects, ‘that mine was the first generation this happened to.’
What happened? But I don’t ask.
From across the savannah come excited cries in the evening air. They have recovered an egg. An egg! O bravo pìopìo!
I remark that the neighbours have been complaining about the hens shitting on the stairs. That cheers the old man up. We laugh together. Another cause for optimism, I tell him, is that they’ve been painting white circles round the drains on Luigi Cadorna. They must be going to fix them up. His laugh turns to derision. ‘No, caro mio, what it means is there is a bike race passing through the street. The riders have to be warned about the drains, since if they hit them that would be the end of their race. So they paint circles round them, but they don’t fix them.’
‘Ah. Perhaps the mad woman will throw a bucket of water over the cyclists.’
Again he laughs, but is not to be brought out of his depression. Not even when I peel a fig and split open its pulpy redness for him. After another silence, scratching lightly, he says the point is that these days, not only do you have to support your kids in their infancy, but throughout their lives as well. Ecco il problema, throughout their lives to the bitter end. In the modern world there is never a moment, never a situation, when you’re not responsible for your kids, when you don’t have to satisfy their enormous appetites. He stubs out his cigarette. Since that wasn’t true for him when he was a child, he can be forgiven for not foreseeing the way the world was going. Whereas I should have been wise to the thing.
He begins to list, though clearly this is still not the nub of the problem, all the sacrifici he has made for his children: taking them round the world with him on his international assignments, always giving them vitamins and iron and whatever was supposed to make them healthy, always paying for the best medical treatment money could buy, always finding the best schools, supporting them through their university education, paying the rent on their flats, paying while they were unemployed, paying while they were employed but not properly paid (as so often happens in Italy), even paying off their debts, contracted without his knowledge…
The list goes on and on, with a mixture of genuine complaint and resigned humour. And is it over? Is it over? No it is not over!
So here we are at last. I wait a little more, and finally he has to tell me. When he returned home, he found two letters waiting for him. He pulls them out of the top pocket of his shirt. He doesn’t know which has made him more depressed. ‘You want to write about Italian children?’ he says. ‘So read.’
They are letters from the twins, Rita’s younger brothers, the children’s beloved uncles, with whom I am on excellent terms. The first is from Renato in Rome. Typed, it expresses itself in somewhat bald terms, which are listed one by one, like the research projects in Michele’s school, like the little boy’s essay on fishing.
Point one: Nonno’s property, if sold for development, would be worth a fortune. Point two: this property belongs to the whole family, not just to Nonno, for the whole family had to make sacrifici in order for Nonno not to sell when times were hard (here Renato remembers, apocryphally, Nonno insists, a time when they had to use newspaper to wipe their bottoms). Point three: it is ridiculous that the children should have to wait till Nonno’s death to enjoy their inheritance. Taxes would wipe out a great deal of the money and they would be too old to enjoy it. Point four: given all of the above, it is Nonno’s duty to his children to sell now. (‘Duty’ and ‘now’ are underlined.) Point five: with some of the money he can buy himself an appartamentino, quite big enough for himself and Nonna.