Giampaolo protests at the first local council meeting I go to. Kids are hanging around all over the place vandalising things and freezing their feet because there are no facilities in Montecchio, no green spaces and nothing for people to do. Actually, Giampaolo is not really very worried about this, since for the moment his daughter always returns at a reasonable hour; but word has got about that the cherry orchard behind the Madonnina at the end of Via Colombare is not to become a public park and recreation area, as originally promised in the plan for the village, but a cooperative housing estate. Which will mean tripling the traffic along our narrow street.
Giampaolo is well spoken, polite, but forthright. A modern, liberal man. There are cries of ‘Sì giustissimo!’ But the Christian Democrat leader in Montecchio, who is also the weasely fellow in charge of the post office, calmly dismisses him. There is volleyball some evenings in the school gym, and the church lays on meetings for young people one or two nights a week. The reason kids are out on the street vandalising things is because they are not being brought up with traditional Christian values in good strong families (murmurings of approval from the older contingent). And it is calumny, he says, to suggest that the Party is in the pockets of the building contractors.
The Christian Democrats’ local office is in an old church on one of the main corners in the village. They poll around 70 per cent of the Montecchio vote. The Veneto in general has a higher Christian Democrat vote than anywhere in Italy, including Sicily. The old church has a small tree growing on its unkept roof. Below, on the grey wall above the flood overflow ditch which runs alongside, someone has spray-painted: ‘FOREIGNERS OUT OF THE VENETO.’
Only two hundred metres away, the Communist Party headquarters is a dark, poky place on the main street opposite Pasticceria Maggia. On a hand-painted wooden board above the door, the hammer and sickle are fading fast. Through the window, old men can be glimpsed at a bare wooden table on which stands a labelless two-litre bottle of wine.
The very same men are also to be seen some mornings sitting under straw hats on a bedraggled couch under a fig tree against the sagging wire fence that surrounds their allotments. The two-litre bottle, however, from behind which they look out over lines of enormous cabbages, is doubtless a fresh one. Youths roar by on their mopeds, confabulate in knots at street corners. After dark, when their parents could not see even if they drove right by, they kiss.
A modest crop of unmarried mothers patrols the streets with their baby carriages, and in general have the sympathy of the population.
The very attractive barista in Pasticceria Maggia is such a case. Her child is eight years old, and perhaps aptly called Luna. The barista serves the people coming out of church. Out of church and into the bar in their Sunday best, which means furs for the women now the cooler air gives them an excuse. There’s a parade feeling about it all. From one institution to another: the host, the brioche.
The church has the largest car park in the village, aside from the supermarket’s, which nobody uses. A capacity of around a hundred cars. It is full Saturday evening for the Mass for those who want to dash off skiing first thing Sunday morning, or those who’ll be so long in the discothèque tonight they don’t expect to make it tomorrow. And it is full again Sunday morning for the Mass for those who want to show off clothes and well-dressed children and get a cappuccino afterwards in the bar and buy attractively wrapped trays of pastries for visits to relatives. Some of these people drive from three or four hundred metres away.
The church car park is also full for funerals and weddings. A bride and groom come out. They have married in their late twenties after being boyfriend and girlfriend since puberty. A photographer is waiting on the steps. But the groom is already lighting a cigarette. Anyway, the real photos will be taken later in an ornamental park the other side of Verona where there is a lake and stone nymphs. The photographer will fade one face over the other against a pre-prepared full moon behind floating in the water. For the moment though, everyone is rushing out of church to try and get their cars out of the car-park before the crush. Since it’s a wedding, they all honk.
Yes, it was certainly wise of the local government to provide such ample parking space, such a large area of asphalt in the middle of the village. But when there are first communions to be celebrated, even this space is unable to contain the flood of traffic and enthusiasm. The cars tuck in by the emergency overflow dike and down the embankment as far as the supermarket. The spiffily dressed relatives step out of black BMWs. Clean, per bene, as they say here: healthy, wealthy, right-thinking people. There is something almost Victorian about the overdressed children, the fussing mothers. Certainly they all know their catechism well enough, as one child after another is accepted into the community. And after the ceremony’s over, it’s off to a restaurant where a table has been reserved for twenty. The expensive festivities will go on all afternoon and the children will be given their golden chains and crucifixes and signet rings.
On his election poster, the local Christian Democrat uses a picture of himself and his wife standing with family and friends around a beautifully laid table with white embroidered tablecloth, tall glasses of bubbly, large slices of panettone. There is no message or slogan, just the candidate’s name; but we can feel reasonably sure that this man supports all the best local aspirations, is the very avant-garde of the bourgeoisie perhaps.
The Christian Democrat’s annual festival is called La festa dell’amicizia, The Festival of Friendship: good friends, good contacts, an aura of universal love and piety. With a subtle shift of emphasis, the Communists call theirs La festa dell’unità, The Festival of Unity. Conjuring up images of rump solidarity, a last stand. In the event, both festivals mean barbecue food and wine, dancing in front of a noisy band (the same one, quite probably) and lines of booths where trivial skills are rewarded with soft toys. If you go to the one you may as well go to the other too. As everybody does, in fact. Because both are a lot of fun.
My wife goes to see the priest who preaches to the faithful week in week out; Don Guido, the small, bespectacled, faintly squinting character who smelt something rotten in Bepi’s shop. He sits behind his large desk in his modern canonica next to the new red-brick church which he himself had built.
What can he do to help?
Rita (for her sins perhaps?) is translating into Italian an American book about the papacy. The book quotes extensively in English from various encyclicals. Does Don Guido by any chance have copies of these encyclicals in Italian? She ought to use the originals, not translate them back herself. And she knows encyclicals are automatically sent out to all priests.
Don Guido has his black cassock on, loose about the shoulders, tight about the stomach. He makes a gesture, at once sly and resigned, of raising his hands, palms upwards. Yes, he gets all the encyclicals. And when they arrive he files them away — in the bin. He smiles. That’s how it is. A modern priest doesn’t have time for encyclicals, he has to deal with real life as it is.
While he is smiling, Rita notices something odd about the desk. Under that glass top he just raised his hands from to make his ironic gesture, are line upon line of tiny photographs. Photographs of faces. Passport size. And they are turned so as to look, not at the desk’s usual occupant, but the other way, toward the supplicant, the interviewee. Rita recognises a face and draws a breath. They are Montecchio’s recent dead staring up from the priest’s glass-topped desk. ‘Riflettete,’ says a little piece of card he has propped up: ‘Think about it.’