But does it actually matter? Well, yes. Once the state recognises that one lives where one lives, there are all kinds of benefits: the right to register your car in the area (otherwise you will have to travel to Y or Z to register it); the right to register with a local doctor; the right to apply for all kinds of local state jobs; the right to have access to certain services and benefits; the right to pay lower phone and utility bills; the right to vote; and, most importantly for us, a 2 per cent reduction on the amount of income tax withheld at source on free-lance services.
‘Va bene,’ I told Signora Marta, if she could write such a letter we would be very happy. ‘La ringrazio.’
But I was puzzled. She hadn’t wanted a formal rent contract. I had half suspected that this was why she hadn’t wanted the phone number in our name: she didn’t want it to be in any way official that we lived here. And now, on the contrary, here she was offering to help us get residence. A calculated risk? Generosity?
‘The flat,’ Rita suggested, ‘is officially owned by Maria Rosa, who is gaga in a nursing home. How is anybody to know that we are paying into Marta’s account?’
Still … Life is complicated. In any event the drift seems to be that the government makes well-meaning but complicated laws and people very sensibly get smart and get round them. For example, there was this business Marta had mentioned that second homes carry much higher utility bills — a popular tax-the-rich measure. However, it is quite common in Italy for the middle and even lower-middle classes to rent their real home in the city where they work and possess a small holiday flat (second home) by the sea, by one of the lakes, or in the mountains. Result: many people register themselves or their wives or children as resident in the holiday home, so as to avoid higher bills. This in turn will create all kinds of other problems. On election day, the registered residents will have to travel a couple of hundred miles to go and vote in some place whose local politics they know nothing about. So they don’t vote, you object. But, in Italy, if one doesn’t vote three times in succession, one loses certain rights … etc. etc. Bureaucracy is a huge tangle of sticky string in which every attempt to loosen one knot tightens another.
And checks, or accertamenti, to make sure that each citizen is contributing his length of string to this tangle, are quite common. A few weeks after moving into Via Colombare, I went out on the balcony to see who had buzzed our bell and found a seriously fat man in uniform sitting on a moped with big dispatch boxes. Montecchio’s local vigile. Taking some papers out of one of these boxes, he asked me something. I asked him if he could please speak Italian. He politely switched from dialect to something more comprehensible, upon which it emerged that he had been asking me whether I lived where quite obviously I was living (wearing pyjamas, a piece of toast in my hand). I said I did. He then asked if he could come and see. And in my kitchen he explained at length about the tassa sui rifiuti, the rubbish-collection tax. This apparently was paid, not by the owner or even renter of a property, but by the head of the household actually living there whether or not resident — that is, they wanted the money and red tape was not a problem (similarly, it is perfectly normal for a foreigner to file an income-tax return without having a work permit). The person in question was me, I said. I would pay. He scratched his head, cocked it to one side, eyed me carefully from his tubby face. ‘Bon,’ he said.
The vigile then wrote something amazingly painstakingly on his sheet of paper. While he worked, I noticed how clean his uniform was, how well-ironed his shirt, how white the little pouch on his belt. It was another day of sultry heat. Despite the weight of flesh beneath all these clothes and accessories, he was not sweating.
He asked my name. Then asked me to spell it. Fair enough. We got through Parks quite rapidly, and were speeding through Timothy (Torino Imola Monza Otranto — I say it in my sleep sometimes) when we ran up against the age-old problem of Y which does not exist in the Italian alphabet. ‘Hotel, Epsilon.’ I finished. He hesitated, raised his head, blew out his cheeks and narrowed his eyes. What was epsilon? ‘Epsilon,’ I said, ‘is a letter.’ ‘Ah sì?’ he said. It was clear that he was used to having his leg pulled, and so had developed these mannerisms — the suspicion, the slow questioning, the stare — to make himself seem less gullible.
Having studied me for a sufficient length of time, he decided I was not the type, said: ‘Sì, Sì, sì, d’accordo,’ and scribbled something down, I didn’t dare to ask him what. But then I had the idea of pulling out my English driving licence and offering it, ‘per una verifica’. Offended, he waved it away.
‘Residenza?’ he now enquired, for even if it had no bearing on my paying this tax or not it was important to write it down. Three or four times.
I was applying for it, I said.
‘Stato di famiglia?’ (a document describing relationships within the family — who is the mother, the father, the head of the household, who the breadwinner, who dependent).
I was waiting for my marriage certificate to arrive from England.
‘Profession?’ For everybody must be classified according to their profession.
I told him teacher. Rather flatteringly he wrote down Professore.
Then just as he was leaving I made the foolish mistake of remarking that we didn’t have this residency business in England.
Again he was clearly concerned that he was being made fun of. There was the same cocking of the head, the puzzlement. He was one of those fat people who are terribly graceful, nimble almost, very aware of their bulk. He turned on his heel away from the door in almost a dance step, pushed back his cap and lowered himself on to a seat at my kitchen table. This was a serious matter.
How was it possible, he asked, for us not to have residency?
We didn’t.
So what do you do? When you move.
You move, I said.
And the registration plates on the car?
You leave them as they are.
And your identity card?
There are no identity cards.
And the doctor?
You go and register at the nearest surgery.
He clearly didn’t believe me. It couldn’t be that easy. Not that I was lying. But I must be ingenuous. There was so much I hadn’t understood. He was wondering how he could prove this to me. He had prickly, Latin black hair cut short under his cap and he scratched at it slowly, tugged at the tubby lobe of an ear. Then he had me.
How, he asked, would the post work?
In what sense?
How would they know where to bring it to, when you moved?
I tried to be equable, offhand. Somebody wrote your address on an envelope, affixed a stamp of the appropriate denomination and the postal service would hopefully take it to that address and ask no questions.
The man got up and left in polite disgust. Obviously it was not a country for vigili.
I was not surprised a few weeks later when the first refuse bill arrived addressed to Parks Thimothj. As for the phone, if you open Verona’s very handsome telephone directory, you will still to this day find the name of Umberto Patuzzi covering up for whoever is enjoying the pleasure of SIP’s services at Via Colombare 10, Flat 3. Doubtless the gas bills are still in his name too. And the electricity bills, despite the curious fact that these actually include the modest charge of 7,000 Lire a year for the votive light over his grave … (second home?).