I can’t decide if this is surprisingly intimate or rather frightening, or both. And I remember our landlady, Signora Marta, fiddling with her keys at the gate that first day, talking about her gynaecological problems.
With the gravity of a Houyhnhnm, Giampaolo takes this opportunity to reflect that, on the whole, public hospitals in Verona function discretamente bene, when compared with hospitals in other areas of Italy, and of course the idea behind the health system as it was initially conceived is indubitably valido. However, it has to be admitted that the apparent success of the local system is del tutto relativo since, if all the people who presently go private were to turn to the public system, it would break down in a matter of days.
Lucilla for example, and Vittorina.
‘Really? They go private? But they’re not particularly well off, are they?’
Giampaolo explains that the old women go to a local health-service doctor whom they tip generously. When they have any tests to do, he always tells them to go to a private clinic, of which he, as it so happens, is a director. And they pay a lot of money. And say, troppo gentile, Dottore, troppo gentile.
We thus discover that it is not so much, or by no means only the upper middle class and the important executive who go private in Italy. Above all it is the ignorant, the workers and peasant class who have tucked something away in their deposit box or in a few government bonds. They can’t believe the public system can work and then, of course, it’s a status symbol to say, I am going to my private gynaecologist, my private cardiologist, my private paediatrician. From whom, more often than not, they will get no receipt.
Rita tells a joke her mother made up when her father Adelmo kept going to the hospital for tests upon tests upon tests. It goes like this. What does a German do in the morning? He jumps out of bed, grabs a cup of coffee and rushes off to work. What does an American do in the morning? He climbs out of bed, sips a cup of coffee, reads the paper for ten minutes and strolls off to work. What does an Italian do?
Long pause. Puzzlement of the Visentini in their spic-and-span sitting-room.
Urinates in a bottle and sets off to the hospital!
Only Lara truly thinks this is funny. The others have a sort of pained smile. Health is so important. Not for nothing did we say ‘Salute’ when we raised those glasses.
And Orietta touches her face. Do we think she should have her mole removed? This little one in the dimple on her cheek. She’s afraid it may be growing. No it’s not very visible because she powders it. Her doctor said to leave well alone, but she went for a second opinion and that doctor said to have a biopsy done. At a private clinic, Giampaolo adds.
Idly, Lara picks up the remote control and the television flicks on. With its usual brutality, the news is showing yet another Mafia killing. Corruption on a more impressive scale. The scene is always the same: the car caught at the traffic lights, riddled with bullets, the corpses in a heap on the front seats, perhaps an arm thrown out of the shattered window, blood trickling down on to the asphalt, spotlights all round for the TV cameras. They have shot General Dalla Chiesa, chief of police in Sicily.
Giampaolo plays with the controls to his motorised aerial on the roof to enable us to get a better view. Weeping relatives are being asked how they feel.
We finish our prosecco and go upstairs. Leaning out over the balcony to get some fresh air we are lucky enough to witness the departure of Simone, the ex-carabiniere. He’s solid, sixtyish, thick head of bristling grey hair, and he has a package under his arm. Too small to be a vacuum cleaner though. He fiddles for the keys to his Fiat 128 parked a hair’s breadth from our iron fence. Lucilla appears on her balcony, barely ten feet away across the façade of the building, although she hasn’t noticed us. In the swinging light of the overhead streetlamp we can see she is heavily made up, dressed to the nines, wearing higher than usual heels, decidedly Felliniesque. She leans over the parapet and begins to whisper enticingly: ‘Simone, Simone caro, when will you phone? Simone, when are you coming to dinner again?’ One imagines him glimpsing her long teeth as he slides down into his car with the heavy sigh of one who has overeaten. Ciao, bella, he calls. She stands watching after him, pensive, huge breasts uplifted. It’s sad to think of this woman being taken for a ride by her doctor. But then, as Rita remarks, she probably paid no tax in the good old days of the cleaning company, so it all works out in the end.
For the next few weeks I practise discreto, valido and relativo on any and every subject that comes up.
16. Una bustarella
THEY HAD SHOT General Dalla Chiesa, the man who had defeated terrorism, the man the government had appointed to defeat the Mafia. About the same time, a very close friend of mine paid his first bribe to a state official. These two facts are not perhaps entirely unrelated.
It’s a complicated story, perhaps a little bit of a digression, but I’d like to tell it all the same because it shows how even the ingenuous foreigner who arrives here, as one arrives most places, more or less by chance, can so easily run up against the dark side of Italy.
This was an extremely close friend of mine. Like me he had arrived in Italy some time before, like me he lived in a little village not far from a sizeable town, like me he had grafted for a while with private lessons and commercial translations until good fortune had landed him one of the much sought-after jobs teaching English at the university, a position offering a decent, steady income for work that is pleasant and not overly taxing. He was delighted. Now he could relax a little. No more the breathless hurry to get from one lesson to the next, only to find the student has cancelled. No more the embarrassment of having to insist that patently rich people deign to pay one with a certain regularity. No more the smell of white-out in the early hours labouring over translations on the recycling of waste sludge in marble saw-mills, the unsurpassable tourist attractions of the nearby town. He was home and dry.
But the contract they made him sign at the university was a strange one. Although to all intents and purposes an employee, in the sense that he had a timetable and certain well-established duties, he was in fact officially free lance, the university retaining 18 per cent of his income as tax (had he not had residenza they would have retained 20 per cent), but paying no health contributions and requiring him to declare the money on a free-lance basis.
Now, since this friend of mine had a VAT number which he used for his translations, he went to the university accounts office to ask them what exactly his tax situation might be. Complicated, they said, and went into great detail. Which he didn’t entirely understand. For Italian tax law might well be written in hieroglyphics for all the average citizen can understand of it. Never mind a foreigner. Rather than on actual income, everything seems to depend on the category of worker you are (artisan, lawyer, doctor, plumber, farmer, shopkeeper …) and the nature of the work you do (regular, casual, occasional, for one client, for various, etc. etc.), with different rules applying for each different category, different tax brackets, different deductions, different percentages for national insurance and so on and so forth. So that at the end of the explanation, which might also have been described with the much used Italian substantive, mistificazione, my sensible friend demanded to know the bottom line: could he retain his VAT number, do a few translations, and do the job at the university without paying VAT on it.