Thus, the local railway station cannot, for example, simply put an advertisement in a local job centre saying they need three cleaning women and give out the jobs on a first come first served basis. Because then the station master might take on friends, or friends of friends — as a favour. Worse still, in the south, the Mafia would get control of things. So no, the railway has to hold a concorso, a public exam, and this must be announced at national level. Because again it would be unfair to exclude people from the south, even though they may, of course, after a couple of years, request transfer back home, thus contributing to overmanning there while reopening the vacancy in the north …
Our ‘competitive exam’ is thus announced in the papers and on posters inside and outside public buildings. Our ‘throng of people’ applies. Perhaps a thousand. Sometimes twenty thousand. Everybody wants to be a caretaker, a receptionist. ‘Fifty Staff taken on to Process Applications for Dustbin Men’, might be the typical headline of some small article in Corriere della Sera. It is never clear how these selecting staff were themselves selected. Whether there has been a pre-concorso, or what. It is as well, one suspects, not to enquire too precisely into the matter.
But what qualifies a person to be a dustbin man? Well, a certain level of intelligence, a certain mental attitude; so a written exam. Then a certain level of reliability, a certain personality; so an interview. But above all, health of course, and so a medical …
Which is where we come to the concorso as ‘coincidence’, or ‘complicity in a crime’; or both.
The story I have in mind is Giampaolo’s, a splendid Italian tale which I think sums up more or less everything that need be said about dipendenti, statali and concorsi. In one of the departments of Giampaolo’s company works a highly skilled young technician who is very clever at his job. So clever that, under the table, the company is paying him more than his fellow workers to keep him. This lad’s father is a Christian Democrat, has always held his membership card, and the son too is a member of the Party and lends a technical hand with Party activities, setting up the dais at the Festa dell’amicizia and such like.
After a few years at the company, the young technician marries. Both his own family and his wife’s feel that the couple would be much more secure if he had a job as a statale. There are threats of recession. The State is the only organisation which will never fire you. Even if it means taking a cut in salary, security and peace of mind are the overriding concerns. And there will be the months of paid paternity leave when they have a child.
So the talented young man decides to take part in a concorso to become a bus-driver. And he goes along with his father to talk to his local Christian Democrat councillor. It is time the councillor did something for a family which has always voted for the Party and always been ready to help out. Otherwise what reason is there for being members? D’accordo, agrees the councillor, va bene. Which is as much as to say: Will do.
But our young technician is a conscientious, honest boy, with a sense of loyalty. He goes and warns his foreman that he will be leaving the company in six months or so, thus giving them time to train up someone else. Because he has applied to be a bus-driver, he explains. And, yes, he knows hundreds of people have applied, but he is sure he will be selected because he has spoken to Christian Democrat councillor X who knows Y who is on the committee.
The foreman promptly buttonholes the managing director. This boy is the cleverest and most efficient we’ve ever had, it will be a major setback if we lose him. The managing director, who is a Christian Democrat and friend of the same local councillor (here’s our concorso as ‘coincidence’, although not such a great one perhaps), phones the said councillor. ‘What is this, stealing our workers? It takes years to train someone to that level. How can a private company even begin to compete with the state with all the ridiculous benefits you’re offering? I’m sorry, but this isn’t on. You’ve got to stop him being selected.’
This places the councillor in a delicate position. The written exam and the interview have already been done, he explains. The boy is already through. He apologises profusely. ‘I can’t change those now, I’m afraid. If only I’d known.’ Until at the last moment he has a brainwave: ‘There’s still the medical though.’
And we arrive at ‘complicity in a crime’.
The doctor is looking at an X-ray. ‘Don’t you get any pain just above the pelvis sometimes?’ The confident young technician says no, he never does. ‘Really? Try and remember. In the small of the back. A dull ache?’ ‘No, never.’ The doctor frowns, hangs the X-ray up on the viewing screen. ‘Come and look at this. Here, you see, too much space between these lower vertebrae. Quite a common malformation, nothing to worry about in the normal way of things.’ He is shaking his head. ‘But I’m afraid it would soon result in disc hernia if you started driving a bus six hours a day.’
And incredibly everybody is happy: the doctor is happy because having done the councillor a favour he is now owed a favour in return, he has a card to play for the future; the councillor is happy because he has ingratiated himself with both young technician and managing director, they will see him as the right man to vote for, their own personal access to power; the managing director is happy because he has kept his worker and demonstrated his ability to wield influence; the skilled young man is happy because he never really wanted to be a bus-driver anyway.
Only the families of the young couple are left with a lingering feeling of regret, of wistfulness for that safe haven. A dipendente’s life is not an enviable one — he depends, as the very word suggests, on the whims of the market, the whims of his employer — and they had wanted the best for their children.
Whenever this story is told, by myself, by Giampaolo, people burst out laughing. The kind of laughter which greets those jokes that confirm a caricature. Yes, how they enjoy this harmless breach in the general omertà. And where could you get a story like that if everything was done in an honest, open way? According to merit. Or even if everything was done on a straightforward and acknowledged basis of nepotism and favouritism. No, it is the superimposition of the bureaucratic and apparently fair over the private and determinedly unfair, the public umbrella, we might say, over the personal intrigue, which breeds so many such stories, and which creates such a delicious tension in so many areas of Italian life. The rules are only a veneer, and indifferently glued on at that; like the Pope’s diktats, or the catechism — no more than the thinnest coat of paint. While in the soft old wood beneath, the jolly worms honeycomb past each other in the dark. Busy and alive.
Curiously enough, I got confirmation of Giampaolo’s story one December evening travelling back from town on the bus. It was rush-hour time, the bus was packed, so I went ahead to stand at the front behind the driver and watch the black countryside flinging by, the starkly twisted shapes of the bare vines against the twilight, the pinpoints of light rising up the hills to the north. In Borgo Venezia, another driver got on and came to stand beside his colleague. Barely a foot away from me, they talked about the most recent concorso for maintenance jobs in the garage. The new arrival had heard from someone in the know that these jobs were to be divided up equally on the basis of the local strength of the political parties; three people chosen by the Christian Democrats, one by the Socialists, one by the Communists … This made it unlikely that a friend of his would get in.