Finally, the accountant phones. He has talked to the VAT people. Could my friend come into his office. They can’t discuss it on the telephone.
And in the office he says: ‘They want a Christmas present.’
‘Prego?’
‘Una bustarella.’ A little envelope. A bribe.
‘Did they say so?’
‘God forbid.’
So how does he know?
He knows. And this burly accountant with thick bushy eyebrows now proceeds with nostalgic revelry to launch into the story of the very first time he offered a bribe. Oh, twenty years ago. He simply became so exasperated with the obtusity of the official he was dealing with that he said, ‘OK, how much do you want?’ and then fell silent, stunned by his own rashness. What if he had read the signals wrong? But he hadn’t.
Later he learned the trick of dropping an envelope on the floor and asking the other if he had dropped it there. Another important indicator was if the official invited you out for a coffee.
It occurs to me, writing this down, that this sort of breathtaking breaking of cover — the dropping of the envelope, the invitation to coffee — is not unlike one’s first declaration of attraction to a possible lover; there’s sudden intimacy and self-exposure. It’s exhilarating.
And, my friend tells me, his accountant was indeed exhilarated. In this case, the man began to explain, he had understood that they wanted a bribe, because otherwise they would have already proceeded to fill in the document requiring him to pay the fine. After which, there could be no turning back, the matter would be officially registered. And had my friend really evaded so much VAT, they would almost certainly have proceeded with the matter and nailed him. As it was, appreciating he was merely a victim of circumstance, they were inclined to let him off the hook in return for a small Christmas present …
‘How much?’
Two days later the accountant phones to say the matter in question would cost 800,000 Lire. My friend should come to his office in a couple of days’ time to say whether he intends to pay.
My friend is still very English. Though less than he was a month ago. In the past week he has joined a group of colleagues bringing a case against the university to be recognised as employees. So he now has a lawyer. An attractive young woman six months pregnant. And finding the idea of paying a bribe somehow offensive, the kind of awful initiation into a different way of life, a different state of mind, that theft or adultery might be, he phones this lawyer to discuss the problem. She is polite and patient, listening to the complex story. Until he gets to the bit about the little envelope, at which she suddenly becomes frantic. ‘Per l’amore di Dio we’re talking on the phone.’ Anyway, she will consult her accountant and ring back.
Which she duly does. Indeed, it’s surprising how kind and helpful and civilised everybody is being. On the phone she’s calm, matter of fact: ‘The manner’, she says — and my friend has written her circumlocutions down because he finds them so amusing — ‘in which your accountant has chosen to resolve the particular difficulties in which, through no fault of your own, you find yourself, although perhaps not immediately attractive, and you do have my sympathy here, is nevertheless not so mistaken as you appear to think. If you follow his advice to the letter, I am sure you will be able to arrive at a soluzione felice without my help.’
But another anxious week has definitely italianised my friend that little bit more. For rather than simply shelling out the 800,000, as it now seems he will have to, he points out to his accountant that since the VAT office’s complaint is based only on that one declaration of four years ago, they could perfectly well pull out the next declarations one by one, year by year, and have him over a barrel for the same amount again.
The accountant accepts this. It is agreed the 800,000 will be paid only if the VAT office can dig up the other declarations and allow the accountant to change them, otherwise the sum must be renegotiated. The VAT men, whom my friend never saw again, and whose names he does not know, are likewise reasonable. No they can’t dig out the other declarations, yes they do appreciate the problem this represents, they will bring their request down to 400,000.
Pride satisfied, my friend pays.
‘And 100,000 for me for negotiating the deal,’ the accountant says, with still no apology for his initial mistake. And no receipt.
Before leaving the office, in the state of exhilaration that every initiation, every surrender of self, brings once one has decided to go through with it, my friend asks the accountant: ‘But it’s so little. Why would anyone corrupt themselves for so little?’
‘No accountant worth his salt,’ the burly man explains, ‘would work in the VAT office. How much can they be getting, two million a month? They have to supplement it. A 100,000 from you, a half a million from me, it all adds up. And the rules are a lot simpler than the written ones.’ Reflectively, as if this has occurred to him for the first time, he adds: ‘There’s only one person I know of in the VAT office who won’t take something sometime. Lucky it wasn’t him picked up your problem.’
My friend walks out into the bright street with the feeling of one waking up from a nightmare. In the end he’s only lost two hundred and fifty odd quid. Not much to pay for a significant experience.
17. Una scampagnata
AND WHEN YOU do wake up from such occasional nightmares, when you turn off the TV with its bullet-ridden cars and improbable corpses (eight in a single village in Sicily the very morning I write this), when you close the newspapers with their intricate political scandals from top to toe of the peninsula, it will often seem that you are living in paradise.
There is no smell on the balcony this Montecchio morning. Perhaps because it is Sunday. The late October air has that look of water in a wineglass, so that one expects, on walking out of the front door, to step into a magic world. And magic it is. Old Marini’s blackbird whistles brightly, perhaps remembering how fine the trees were on such sweet mornings, the sharp silhouettes of the hills, the nobly etched cypresses dark against the glowing gold of autumn cherry leaves.
We wait in the street for the old ladies to return from Mass, then set off with them, Orietta, Giampaolo and Lara on a scampagnata, a long walk up into the hills. We are going to see Lucilla’s daughter, Marisa, who is not in fact her daughter, Lucilla now confides, but the child of a sister conceived and born adulterously while the husband was in prison and handed over to Lucilla at just a few weeks old to make the husband’s release less turbulent. Lucilla’s own and only child died at eighteen months, poveretto. From the long story she tells us about his illness it becomes clear that Lucilla quite probably provoked his death herself by applying scalding poultices to his entire body in an attempt to overcome some banal influenza. Shortly afterwards, a miscarriage led to her having la totale at only twenty. La totale is the grim Italian expression for a hysterectomy. Once again, I reflect that while people from the Veneto are generally reserved and formal, nevertheless when they get on to the subject of their health there is simply nothing, nothing they will not tell to the most casual acquaintance, from varicose veins to mastectomy, prostatitis to mere constipation. And, indeed, it’s not long before Rita, Vittorina and Orietta are discussing various forms of tisane, or herb concoctions, which help to keep one regular. Vittorina has a plastic bag to put camomile plants in as she walks along. A new shop, it appears, is to open next to Bepi’s and the girl is an excellent herbalist. She even has a mix for flatulence.