On another table — wait until somebody kindly passes it to you — is L’Arena, Verona’s local newspaper. Since they are talking about the agricultural fair, a headline proudly announces that the city is L’ombelico verde d’Europa — the Green Belly Button of the EC. Well, there are the two scrubby patches of green outside the window in Piazza Buccari … The fact that a member of the local government is under investigation for corruption barely gets ten column centimetres, for this is his party’s newspaper. Turning a page, yesterday’s dead stare at you from identity-card photographs — you can look for the features of some hated employer — while advertisements opposite offer tickets for tonight’s Aida at the Arena, Shakespeare at the Teatro Romano, ten or twelve channels of TV viewing.
Why am I advising you to do all this? Because, quite apart from its simply seeming the height of relaxation and civilisation, it is impossible to be a regular customer here at Pasticceria Maggia, to soak up the chit-chat around you, to be sweetly served and smiled at by that pretty barista, to browse through the local scandals in the paper, watch bicycle races passing by amidst honking and cheers across the street, without gradually beginning to feel that you are getting into the spirit of things.
People begin to nod to you, beginning disconcertingly with the child-size village idiot in his deerstalker cap. But you will gain respect by putting up with his badgering. Smile, show no embarrassment. Say: Salve, Moreno, tutto bene? He’s a nice boy in the end. And here’s an invitation to teach your doctor’s struggling daughter English, a request that can be politely turned down having discussed at length the inadequacies of the education system (the Arena will keep you informed). On weekday mornings around ten you can score points by greeting the post-office workers coming in for their long coffee break. These are not your favourite people when they refuse to look up at you from behind their murky little windows and then start weighing your postcards and forgetting whether Britain is part of the EC. Now you can enjoy perhaps glancing at your watch and smiling too brightly as they lean on the bar and discuss what shopping they have to do. Frustratingly, they are unperturbed. They even seem friendly, as if the bar were a place of truce. Perhaps they will serve you faster if they see you here a lot. Or, when those British football oo-lee-gans commit one of their regular atrocities, you can agree with local youngsters poring over the strident Gazzetta that your fellow countrymen are a degenerate lot, although pointing out in their defence that the performance of the national team, at least until Gazza came, has often been almost an incitement to insurrection (nothing more welcome to Italians than gently running down la perfida Albione, they feel extraordinarily competitive in our regard).
As the months pass and you continue to sit and sup, you will doubtless be approached by the ex-priest, Lorenzo, now converted to ecology and admirably determined to save Montecchio’s famous ditches. He will ask you to sign something and you will sign it. In the corner, old men are muttering over Verona’s relegation prospects; soon you will be able to talk about that too. After Mass on Sunday mornings (did I mention the tiny crucifix on the wall above the liquor?) it will be the eight widows who put two tables together and confabulate in low voices, forming, in winter, a wall of fur coats. Even they will begin to smile at you after a year or so, perhaps wondering how long your own wife will outlast you.
Maybe you spot your butcher, your greengrocer, your dentist. Somebody asks you if you can do a translation for them. They run a picture-frame company. No invoice required. For heaven’s sake. Somebody walks over to mention a friend who has failed his exam at the university a couple of times and needs a helping hand. ‘Perhaps you’ll remember the name if it’s you doing his oral.’ ‘Well, I’m afraid I shouldn’t really …’ ‘Virgilio, he’s called. Virgilio Gandini.’ Somebody else is having trouble with the American instruction manual to the sprinkler system for his lawn. And that somebody knows another somebody who could fix the wobbly bearings on your car …
It would be a foolish resident of Montecchio who did not at least occasionally pop into Pasticceria Maggia, a short-sighted newcomer who did not invest in at least a couple of years’ worth of cappuccini …
Coming out on that first occasion, the morning after the evening before, I remember we almost ran into two grinning young carabinieri sauntering in in their beautiful uniforms with the scarlet-striped trousers and white breast straps. Something that might have been an elongated black beer-can swung from a handsome belt, complete with trigger. A tall, dark girl appeared from the kitchen holding high two trays of cannoli and various other pastries; there were smiles, some relaxed flirtation. The barista minced. They ordered their cappuccini. Cigarettes were lit. One crouched down to chat to a little child, asked predictably: What is your name, where do you live? Nobody seemed at all concerned by the submachine-gun the other was fingering as he spooned sugar over his foam.
Outside, we found their small, dark blue 850cc Fiat van parked in the middle of the small road, blocking anyone who wanted to get by. A radio could be heard calling them with some urgency. Should we go back in to tell them? But no. They are having their cappuccino. They only have a few minutes before it’s aperitivo time. They wouldn’t want to be disturbed.
4. Laghetto Squarà
WITH ALL THAT unpleasant unpacking and sorting out awaiting us back at the flat, we might well have chosen to make a detour before returning to Via Colombare that morning. Anything to stave off the evil day. We would thus have discovered how, following the line of the hills coming down from the north, the village of Montecchio, grey-green with dust and heat, is crossed, crisscrossed, by perhaps a score of small, lively streams bubbling swiftly through stone and grass and following a complex system of sluices which divert the water to feed neglected sheep dips, duckponds, irrigation ditches and great flat scouring slabs at the bottom of broken steps where the occasional older woman can still be seen scrubbing her husband’s underwear with a soapstick. The through road from Verona thus corners sharply left, right and left again, as it gropes for the two key bridges that will allow it to continue on its way to the outlying village of Olivè. With all the dips and curves it takes in the process, the sudden widenings and narrowings, the canyon-high kerbs followed by treacherous gutters and unexpected cambers, this chameleon strip of tarmac confers upon the village a splendid sense of the haphazard ad hoc, as if the asphalt had been put down in thick fog to reach the scene of some emergency, or, more likely, festival.
Geography, we discovered, is immediately mystified in Montecchio. Paths cut this way and that. One watercourse flows over, beside, under another. House, factory, farm, supermarket, all stand next to each other, although higgledy-piggledy, or are even built one inside the shell of another. The most obvious routes are blocked by dikes or long stone walls. Apparently parallel streets mysteriously lose all contact with each other. So that for the first few weeks one feels a sense of admiration, even bewilderment at seeing how confidently and, above all, how fast, cars shoot through streets where, due to the lack of pavements, so many corners are blind. Such things as bollards are unknown of course, and certainly undesired. Only a memory of a white line haunts the thoroughfares like some sermon heard and ignored long before; with the result that the sharp bends and corners of the main street are viciously cut by motorists and cyclists alike, especially during siesta time when it is not generally supposed that anybody could be coming the other way.