At number 10, winter means sweeping and mopping the stairs with the same monotonous regularity we watered the garden in summer. It means freezing to death because the roguish builder who put up this place installed tiny, inefficient radiators. It means a plastic Christmas tree appearing on the first landing and schlocky red and gold decorations pinned to the satin-finish wooden front doors. At night it means Vega wailing to the cold stars as he paces the frostbound soil outside, and the constant constant whine of Lucilla’s central-heating pump.
Although each household has its own separate heating system, the boilers are not located in the flats but all together down in a tiny cellar; and Lucilla’s is mounted against the outer wall in correspondence to one of those reinforced concrete pillars. Thus, every time her system starts up, the building hums. And she keeps it on all night.
Giampaolo goes upstairs to complain. As for everything else in Italy, there is a law about when you can and can’t turn on your central heating. It was brought in after one of the oil crises. You can’t turn on before 1 November and you must turn off after the end of March. During the day you can’t turn on before six in the morning and you must turn off after eleven in the evening. And between six and eleven you can’t have it on more than a total of twelve hours.
Naturally, like the emergency provision about watering gardens, this law is generally ignored, except perhaps by the stingy owners of large blocks of flats where the rent collected is supposed to cover the cost of heating. Giampaolo, however, hopes to use the rules to play on Lucilla’s fears of authority and convince her to stop bothering us with the sound of her pump every night.
It is typical perhaps of a dipendente, an encyclopaedia reader and a modern man to appeal to the law. And Giampaolo does seem to know them all, how far they are valido and how far their value is relativo. I can hear him talking politely and persuasively to her at her door, right outside our own. But on this occasion Lucilla isn’t impressed. Because her health is at stake. She has been coughing a lot. Then she is dieting, which makes her cold and constipated despite all the herb teas she is trying. When Giampaolo, polite as ever, backs down, she tells him he is troppo gentile and asks if he would like to come in and drink a glass of something with her. She is having trouble getting Telepace, the Vatican channel, on her TV …
Winter. I sit at Patuzzi’s great desk where he must have leafed through many a sunny brochure on similarly bleak days, fantasising about the ever more exotic road signs he could pose beside. The temperature is well below zero, but the breath of the cadaverous woman opposite barely steams her window pane as she stares out with infinite patience. To one side, between her house and ours, a tangle of branches reaches up into the sky. It’s the one tree in Negretti’s garden. And on those branches are what I at first, in my ignorance, imagine to be oranges: beautiful big round abundant fruit hanging by invisible threads from a tracery of leafless black twigs above. In the staring twilight, they start to glow, reminding me of Marvell’s lines: ‘He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.’
But we’re not in the Bermudas, despite Patuzzi’s ghost. And the evening isn’t green, but grey, a blue smoky grey. And of course these aren’t oranges at all, but cachi, a very soft fruit with a peel like a plum’s, only thicker, and inside a lush pulp with a tremendously sensual texture and sticky sweet taste. They are the only fruit I know of I’ve never seen in a London greengrocery. They are too delicate to travel. Even Bepi doesn’t like stocking them because they ruin so easily. Negretti lets most of his fall to the ground in a blackening orange mush over dead leaves before telling his sons to go out and pick the last few. Then, one-handed as he is, he does a little pruning with a chainsaw. Twigs and branches fly. The old woman with her shawl watches impassive till evening deepens. Then she leans out and draws her decrepit shutters to, turning to give me a last wan smile before they close. It seems unlikely that her house has any central heating at all.
Vittorina comes out of her Christmas-decorated door to find me mopping the stairs. For it is our turn. She is obviously disturbed to find me doing this menial work rather than my wife. Is Rita ill? If I had told her, she would have taken our turn. ‘No, she’s fine, but she has a rush translation job on,’ I explain. Clearly it is not sufficient explanation. Vittorina looks troubled; cleaning the stairs just isn’t a man’s job. Her husband Giosuè, for example, whose grave she is off to visit, never cleaned the stairs. I tell her how often I wish I’d been born into the world and values of fifty years before. She takes this perfectly seriously. And maybe it does have a little sniff of seriousness about it. For if there’s one thing I hate it’s cleaning these marble stairs, and reflecting how carefully Orietta and Giampaolo will look at them afterwards, how they notice if you don’t get your mop into the corners or if you sweep dust under doormats. I have heard them criticising Vittorina’s performance. There’s something that spells death for me in obsessive cleaning. The cemetery is a clean place. Could it be the English let their cemeteries get untidy so that they won’t remind us of death so much?
Giampaolo walks in with a carpenter holding a huge polished shelf about eight feet long and almost three inches thick. They apologise for muddying my stairs, but Giampaolo is paying for the carpenter’s time. Then Lucilla comes out on to the stairs above. ‘Rina! Rina!’ she calls. I tell her Vittorina is out taking flowers to Giosuè. Lucilla asks if I would come up to her flat and help her with the Yellow Pages. She can’t remember the name of her dressmaker and would I read out all the ones in the phone book. I lay down my mop.
For some reason, everybody is having something made for them. Perhaps it’s because, with the world outside being so icy and damp, winter naturally becomes a time for home improvements. Giampaolo is changing the focus of his sitting-room, the position of the TV. Instead of having it on a raised platform in the far corner he has invited the same carpenter who previously did that job to relocate his impressive set alongside a row of equally impressive encyclopaedic volumes on one of two huge, specially made shelves which pin directly into the walls with no visible brackets. The whole plan is undertaken with the utmost seriousness. A plug socket will be moved to directly behind the TV so that no wires need be visible.
At the same time Vittorina, in the flat opposite, is getting another carpenter in the village to replace her kitchen furniture. There are long consultations as to the height and depth of cupboards, the position of the lights, the need to change the fridge so as to have one the right width for the new cupboards, etc. etc. People here seem to enjoy this so much more than just going to a store and buying the readymade thing. Over the years they establish a relationship with their carpenter and then during dinner-table or taverna conversation they will boast that he is the best in the provincia and they would give you his name and number if only he wasn’t so busy he’d never have time to fit somebody new in. They talk about il mio falegname di fiducia (my trusted carpenter); and quite probably they have an electrician di fiducia too, and a bricklayer di fiducia, and a tailor or dressmaker di fiducia, and undoubtedly a butcher. Indeed, the Veronese rarely seem happier than when talking about their somebody di fiducia. A social status is implied, the status of the person who doesn’t just buy what the market offers, nor stoops, as the Englishman might, to DIY, but discusses and creates together with his craftsman. It’s the status, almost, of the patron.