Turning to leave she sees there is a photocopier in one corner. A notice says: ‘Copies are free, but contributions are not refused.’
A popular private midwife in the village has the same line. Her prenatal examinations are free, but if people want to give her something … Women ask other women how much they should give. Not less than 50,000 a check-up.
Perhaps inevitably, the figure of the priest attracts all kind of stories, some probably apocryphal, some not. Famous for his careless driving, it is rumoured that late one night Don Guido had to call on a farmer to get a tractor to pull him out of a ditch. And in his car was an adolescent boy who had no cause to be there. Others maintain he has had more than one girl around the village. Recently, the canonica was robbed and poor Don Guido bound, beaten and gagged. All the same, he did not report the matter to the police. Why not? Because his son was involved, wasn’t he …
Or so the rumour goes. But one quickly gets the impression that this is merely the kind of thing people like to say about village priests. The combination of celibate status and social prominence is too inviting for the fable-monger. And then it’s important for the congregation that the priest be a wholesome sinner like themselves. Just as it is important for them that the men in the tax office take bribes … Certainly I have never met anyone who pretended to be shocked.
One evening in Via Colombare, Giampaolo adds a new element to the Don Guido dossier by confirming that the priest has made something of a mission of going to preach to the prostitutes who hang around on the sheepskin seats of their white Mercedes near the station in Verona. Giampaolo admires him for this and feels he is valido as a priest and discreto as a preacher. The relativo aspect would appear to be that Giampaolo sees the Church as one of the conservative elements that keeps the local mentality so provincial. ‘After all, prostitutes do have a social function,’ he reminds us very seriously.
More prosaically, Don Guido keeps rabbits (also white and furry) behind the church, and hens and ducks too. When he meets children in the street he pulls boiled sweets from his pocket and tousles their hair. Then invites them to come and see his rabbits.
For Lucilla, Don Guido is a great religious intellectual, a kind, generous man, another person she can endlessly find troppo gentile. Especially now he has agreed to testify to how she nursed Maria Rosa those months after il professore died. A major point in her favour when it comes to authenticating the scribbled will.
Vittorina pays Don Guido to say Masses for her dead husband. She likes to light candles at twilight and mutter her rosary in the fat, waxy smoke. She buys any number of the religious publications displayed near the door. Miracles upon miracles of the saints.
Orietta is thankful to Don Guido because when, in confession, she told him she used contraceptives, he told her to act according to conscience. It was between her and God. There is concern and disbelief over another excellent bottle of Giampaolo’s prosecco, when I point out that this is one of the main precepts of Protestantism.
But Don Guido is a little less Protestant when he goes to talk to Maria Grazia, the busty herbal specialist next to Bepi’s who can advise such efficacious tisane. Her shop is officially a sanitaria, a sort of chemist’s, but without the pharmaceutical side. It sells baby equipment, basic orthopaedic aids, elastic stockings, corsets, maternity bras, bandages, Elastoplast … and condoms. Don Guido complains that being the fine churchwoman she is, she shouldn’t be selling contraceptives. Maria Grazia thus has the unenviable problem of trying to reconcile genuine religious devotion with social conscience and commercial flair. She goes on selling her condoms. And, what’s more, at less than the manufacturer’s list price. When the representative comes round, he tells her the local chemist has complained. He knows she is undercutting him on the price. He sent a spy to buy some. The representative says she will have to comply with the list price, or he won’t bring them. But Maria Grazia continues to sell at the lower price to people she knows. Because it is ridiculous that a condom should cost twice or three times as much in Italy as it does in other parts of Europe.
Does the Pope’s strong stand on contraceptives have anything to do with Don Guido’s complaints? Or is he a good friend of the chemist’s? In any event we discover that Maria Grazia rushed into marriage as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. She had meant to be a doctor.
The Scholl sandals representative also tells Maria Grazia that the chemist has complained about her undercutting him. It is concorrenza sleale, unfair competition. She must comply.
A Corriere della Sera article shows that Italian shopkeepers have the highest margins in Europe.
Maria Grazia tells us that when she opened her shop, the first sanitaria in Montecchio, she couldn’t understand why so many old women would come in asking for large, sterilised sponge gloves, right handed. Later she realised it was because they did not want to touch themselves ‘in that place’, when they took their bidets.
When a tax inspector comes to see if Maria Grazia uses her electronic till and gives receipts that correspond to the price paid, you can always tell, she says, because they hang around a few minutes, looking a bit lost, then choose the cheapest item in the shop, the herbal chewing gum she has on the counter, for example. She gives the man his receipt and promptly phones up a couple of other shopkeepers to pass on the message. If they haven’t already called her. But not the chemist. Who is opening his own herb section now.
The inspector then goes on to Un panino due’s and asks him if he has the pane comune whose price is fixed by the government and used to determine the rate of inflation. A baker is obliged by law to have this bread. So the old man pulls out the one bag he bakes a day just in case the inspector comes. The government has fixed the price too low and anyway nobody asks for the stuff. Maria Grazia says it has no bran in it and makes you constipated.
Speaking about health, I ask Giampaolo jokingly if he doesn’t suffer from tachycardia like his wife. He drinks so much coffee. Perfectly poker-faced, he says no, he suffers from extra sistole. He is having a series of tests done at the hospital. I have to consult my dictionary later to discover that this simply means he sometimes misses a beat.
Orietta, meanwhile, has been missing more than one beat recently, because they have changed the refuse-collection system. In the past, a man came down Via Colombare on a bicycle affair behind a huge bin. He emptied the street’s rubbish into it, then pedalled off to unload the lot into a truck. There was something very Dickensian about it. But now they have introduced the cassonetto, a very large fibreglass container on wheels with lids opening on top and fluorescent reflectors on the side. There’s one every twenty or so houses. You take out your rubbish and next day the truck comes by, lifts the container with automatic arms and tips it up into its press. A jet of hot water washes the fibreglass inside, then it is lowered back into place again.
All of which seems marvellously efficient to me. The best refuse service I have ever seen. The truck passes regularly three times a week.
But the woman at number 8, wails Orietta, keeps moving the wheeled cassonetto so that it’s always opposite our flat. And when it gets full, the lid won’t close any more. The smell could bring germs and disease and death!