And I pick up the tab, as I always knew I would. It’s risen to fifteen thousand lire since the earlier estimate. Extortionate. The price I’ve had to pay, I somehow can’t help thinking, for the kiss Stefi saw in the sea, or all the kisses of all the Marcias and Amalias that appear to have inspired her.
Tengo famiglia.
Tradition has it that you eat your chips sitting on the low seafront wall by the six-a-side football court. One might think that a better place would be the terrace of the Medusa, but as if to show that Italians don’t always have good taste, this is lit in the evening by low-slung fluorescent lights, which, like Gorgon’s eyes, turn all to stone beneath them, while the lovely trees and all the soft rustling shapes of the place are lost in ink above.
So we sit and eat and drink and watch the floodlit six-aside teams. They are brilliant. They play with such style, such panache, and so cleanly. You wonder if some of these local boys shouldn’t be immediately enlisted among the azzurri. Everybody gets excited by the game, and the children want to know who you’re rooting for so that they can root for them too, except that mostly Michele wants to root for the team that will win.
‘Evviva i rossi!’ he finally decides when they score a goal.
The crowd is still sauntering back and forth along the front, as it has since eight this morning. The traffic is still booming. People are still in their bathing costumes, perhaps on bicycles weaving in and out, or in each other’s arms, or holding the handles of their two-year-olds’ tricycles. Only towards the fatal hour of ten, does the crowd suddenly disappear, the evening suddenly grow quiet. It’s time for the big game. The patatine man is left in peace…
And of course, Nigeria score first. And Italy don’t score. And the game goes on and on and on, and still Italy don’t score. And don’t even look like scoring. Until Nonno and Nonna begin to say the same things about the azzurri they have just been saying about their children. That they’re all spoilt kids. That they’ve been given too much. Too much money. They think everything’s due to them. They don’t try. Everybody in Italy has got too rich since the war. They themselves stayed away and travelled the world and didn’t get rich at all, and then when they come back, what do they find, they find everybody is rolling in it, everyone’s rich and spoilt and the national team can’t beat the Africans…
Still the azzurri don’t score. I fear this game bodes ill for the twins and their financial requirements. I try to distract my in-laws with some linguistic reflections. ‘Notice how the commentator always says intervento regolare — fair tackle — when an Italian makes a dubious tackle that the referees lets by, and then intervento giudicato regolare — judged fair — when the others do it. With the obvious subtext…
But nobody wants to hear this kind of remark. For still Italy haven’t scored. It’s nail-biting. It’s unbelievable. The azzurri are going out. To Nigeria! Michele starts to get quite angry with me because I don’t care enough, because I probably want Italy to go out. I’m not Italian. But he is. He’s Italian, and he wants Italy to win. He’s in tears. I actually feel guilty — it’s the first time he’s shown any national feeling of this intensity — and I have to insist that I do want Italy to win, though the truth is I find the commentator so unpleasant and smug I’d just love to hear what he’d have to say when…
More sensibly, Stefi has lost interest and is trying to stand on her head on the couch, perhaps to show off her pretty pink knickers. About every ten seconds she says, ‘Has anybody made a goal? Has anybody made a goal?’ Which only gets Michele the more furious.
For still Italy haven’t scored. With five minutes to go the commentator has started talking about the team as them rather than us. This is ominous, indeed. And now he uses the word Caporetto! Yes, there it is. Defeat, disaster. Shame. Beaten by the Africans, the immigrants. These exact words are not said, of course, but the sense of imminent humiliation throbs with racism. Nonno and Nonna are silent, staring. The whole of Italy is silent.
Until GOL! GOL! Baggio’s scored. No, we have scored. Our boys have scored. The azzurri have scored. Bravissimi azzurri. The TV explodes. The room explodes. The world outside explodes. Half the team cross themselves. And Stefi too, upside down on the couch (is this sacrilegious?). And later, when Italy win the game with a dubious penalty in off the post, it will be horns honking late into the night and fireworks and people getting killed driving their cars too fast or trying to get ten people on a Vespa…
In bed, before her goodnight kiss, Stefi says, ‘You promised.’
‘Promised what?’
‘Yes, you did promise,’ Michele tells me more seriously. He’s radiant, of course. Italy won. But Stefi is averting her face. Then I remember. Tomorrow, June 24th, is San Giovanni Battista, not quite the summer solstice but nearly, and Zia Paola has explained to the children that there’s a tradition that on this, the shortest night of the year, one gets up before the dawn to go down to the beach to see the sun rise over the Adriatic. And though it must be controindicato, for the air is so humid, some people actually take a swim as well. So Paola told them. Apparently, in some state of semiconsciousness, I have promised.
‘Well, if you had gone to bed in decent time…’
Can’t you just hear your own father’s voice sometimes, when you start explaining why a promised treat is impossible? That tone of inexorable reason.
‘It’s so late now, it’s past midnight…’
‘Per favore, Papà!’
‘No!’
Nonno, standing at the door, says, ‘I’ll take them. I never sleep much.’
Then you feel jealous that someone else is going to give your children such an experience, and you cave in. ‘Okay…’
‘O Papà!’
The arms now reach up to grab me round the neck. The red lips are going to kiss me on the mouth. I shall have to tell her to be a little less obvious about this kind of behaviour. Two weeks at the beach may have been too much.
Aurora
So here’s a real honest to goodness sacrificio, a project worthy of my mother’s kind of holiday… To see the sun rise over the Adriatic in midsummer, you have to get up at about four o’clock. On this particular night that means less than four hours’ sleep. If only it was sleep… For even when the honking has died down, and the occasional firecracker, and the shouts of youths on Luigi Cadorna, even then the hot night is full of cats moaning and howling and generally giving the impression that love is some sort of infernal punishment. Not a new idea. Nonna’s nonna apparently used to say that the way to discourage lovemaking cats was to pour a bucket of water over them, and this I once managed to do, back in Verona. It worked well enough, too; only afterwards I felt somewhat mean. So tonight I just get out of bed and walk barefoot into the savannah to shoo them off, remembering again, as I do so, the lovingly anchored catamaran and Michele and Stefi calling help. Coming back into the house, there is a huge frog sitting in moonlight on the doormat. He looks as though he’s waiting for something. As if he might turn into Roberto Baggio or something. Roberto bloody Baggio. Principe azzurro. I will never be Italian. I will never in my heart of hearts be able to support the Italian national football team. My boy idolises the sullen bugger. Good for him.