Throwing open the iron door, drawing me to the threshold to gaze inside, Giampaolo Visentini was obviously a taverna fan. Perhaps for him the taverna represented some unthinkable loosening up, or an occasion when the more difficult social skills could be replaced by simple prowess with the barbecuing fork. In any event, showing me the gloomy place (I remember antlers and crossed ski poles on thin whitewash) he began to betray the first signs of life and enthusiasm. Did I like barbecuing? Did I like grilled aubergine? And bruschetta (toasted bread with olive oil and garlic)? I said, yes, yes I did. And was I interested in bottling my own wine? The people in his company always clubbed together to bring a truck-load of casks from a particularly good vineyard in Friuli. If I would like to split a cask of Cabernet or prosecco with him I should let him know in good time. We could buy in October and bottle next spring. The price was low and the quality excellent. I said to count me in at once, I was always ready to give something a try. By the time we were climbing the stairs again there was a feeling we might just make it as neighbours.
Then, running the gauntlet of Lucilla’s door to get back through our own, we heard our phone ringing for the first time. Signora Marta, perhaps, having forgotten to tell us where the serious books and spare light bulbs were kept. Or one of the numerous schools and agencies we had immediately passed the number on to.
‘C’è il dottor Patuzzi?’ a confident older man’s voice asked.
I froze.
‘Parla Giordano. Una questione di documenti.’
‘But Patuzzi’s dead. He’s been dead two years and more.’
‘But his name’s in the phone book,’ this voice objected.
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
‘Ah. In quel caso non insisto.’ And the phone went, well, dead.
Rita said: ‘It’s if they say, “Patuzzi speaking”, you should start worrying.’
But somehow it seemed that when you had just cleaned all of a man’s junk out and read a few of his letters and seen his well-thumbed girly magazines and his boyhood skis and a crucifix by his parking space, then fantasmi were not an unreasonable proposition.
6. Residenza
IT WOULD HAVE been some weeks later we tried to change that entry in the phone book. We phoned SIP, the telephone company and were told that in order to have our names in the phone book with that number we would need a recent certificate of residenza in bollo (that is with a few thousand Lire’s worth of special stamps on it) and signed renunciation of the number by Patuzzi, or his heir. The contratto for the phone would then be shifted, for a small charge, into our name and the bills would be addressed to us.
By the standards I have grown used to, this seemed something of a breeze. A check at our local comune, a pleasant enough little office with the inevitable crucifix, an impressive collection of rubberstamps and a large computer on line to the city registry, provided the information that for certificates of residency we would need either proof of ownership of the said flat as first home, or a written statement from the owner that we were tenants there. This should be on carta bollata — legal paper with, again, a few thousand Lire’s worth of stamps on it.
So we rang Singora Marta. She was very polite but unable to understand why we wanted to change the name, ‘referring to the number in the phone book’. Couldn’t we simply tell everybody we wanted to phone us what our number was? We explained that there might be people who wanted to track us down for work. We were liberi professionisti. But if, she objected, they knew of our names, then they could ask the people they’d heard of us from. Non è vero? People who would surely have our telephone number or know someone who had it. Telephone directories were thus demonstrated to be entirely useless.
No, she added, the point was, it would be extravagant if we were only staying for a year. Because when we were gone we would of course renounce the number, so as not to be listed under it any more and have bills for it in our names, at which point she could if she chose have the line disconnected, but then God knew how long it might take to get it reconnected and how much that would cost. The result being that she would most probably have to take the number on in her own name (rather than Patuzzi’s). And since she already had a phone number, this number (Via Colombare’s) would be registered as a second home phone, meaning much higher basic bills even if she made no calls.
So many conversations in Italy follow these serpentine paths, with new laws and regulations constantly raising their ugly heads to turn the most obvious ways forward into dead ends. With the creeping sense of paranoia that results, you occasionally find that people have been imagining rules that don’t actually exist, simply because they seem to be the kind of thing the government would invent to make life more difficult and hence probably has. Was it really true, for example, that Marta would be obliged to register the number in her name. Couldn’t she register it in a child’s or grandmother’s? Or was it that if she did that they would then have to switch their residenza to Via Colombare with all the problems that entailed?
I proceeded cautiously: when we left the flat, I said, if she asked us to leave it that is, and we rather hoped she wouldn’t because we liked it here, then this would presumably be because she had decided to sell it, or had found someone else to live in it, and in either case the new occupant would want to take over the phone, wouldn’t they?
‘Not if they already have one in their own name elsewhere,’ she came back. ‘Or if they want to retain residency in another province.’
Who could have thought of this before starting the phone call? Then, when I had already given up and offered a cool arrivederci, she suggested by way of an olive branch: ‘I don’t mind writing to say that you live there, though, if you need to have residenza for other purposes.’
How explain the elusive yet all-important significance of ‘residency’ to a Brit who merely lives where he lives and acts accordingly? Can we hazard a definition? Residency means that the state now recognises that you live where you live, or say you live (for example, in the province of X at such-and-such an address) and henceforth will distinguish you from all the people who live in another province, or country, or who do, yes, live in X but whom the state does not recognise as living where they live (in X), either because those people want to be recognised as living elsewhere (where they don’t live) and have managed by some wangle to achieve this, or because they can’t get hold of some precious documento that would allow them to demonstrate that they do in fact live where they live (in X), and must thus continue to be recognised as living where they no longer live (in Y or Z, for example).