Thus, despite the carefully deployed anxiety of the public broadcasting service before the event, and despite the fact that so many people hold residency and thus voting rights in cities far away from where they live, the turnout is a huge 90 per cent. This truly amazes me, and I bully everybody I know to try and extort some satisfactory explanation. To no avail. A love of secrecy, writing down the name of a friend of a friend in the polling booth perhaps? A residual concern that not voting might prejudice one’s position in some concorso to become a teacher, or caretaker (Vittorina and Lucilla were both unaccountably worried about missing the election)? Genuine fear of a Communist government? Or perhaps — and it’s the explanation I would plump for — perhaps, despite all disillusionment, a very profound, heartfelt satisfaction with the way things are and a determination that they should remain so. I plump for it because it has the hallmark of that profound schizophrenia, which is also the charm, of all matters Italian: the Pope adored and ignored, the law admired and flouted, politicians despised and re-elected. The gulf between officialdom’s façade and private thought could not be greater than it is here. But in the secret of the ballot box that façade is always supported. Nothing changes. Italy, one sometimes thinks, is as if frozen in the high noon of its post-war prosperity.
I played a little game with my students on our last lesson of the year. I suggested they write down who they think their barber/hairdresser votes for and why. Normally responsive and fun to teach, my request left them nonplussed, diffident, reticent. It was as if one had asked some ancient Athenian to explain the Eleusinian mysteries. A completely taboo subject. Montecchio, in the event, returned the Christian Democrats with the usual 70 per cent of the vote, but I have yet to meet anyone here who will speak well of the party. ‘The only good thing about elections’ — Bepi deigned to mention the subject over an espresso with grappa at eight in the morning — ‘is that the results are so complicated that for a month and more afterwards there’s no government at all. And so for a while, non possono rompere le palle!’ Which loosely translated means, They can’t get on our fannies.
‘If the country’, comments il frate indovino, ear perfectly tuned to the popular mood, ‘could buy politicians for what they’re really worth and then sell them for what they claim they’re worth, it could pay off its deficit in no time at all.’
Doubtless our witty priest votes Christian Democrat.
36. La luna
THE BABY WAS late. Rita was finding the heat and summer afa oppressive. We bought a fan and she sat at her typewriter in a stream of dusty air. When the Visentini got to know, Orietta felt it her duty to come upstairs and warn us that fans were controindicati. You sweated, then sat in the air from the fan, and inevitably caught a cold. She was also worried that we hadn’t got rid of our cat. Cats could cause all kinds of diseases when one had a little baby in the house. I often wonder if perhaps Italian houses of the future won’t be designed with some sort of disinfectant footbath in the entrance way. We liked our cat.
Meanwhile, whenever I bumped into anyone in Via Colombare an eyebrow would be raised. Any news yet? If there’s anything I can do … Even the mechanic at the end of the street, smelling strongly of grappa after lunch as always, was in the know. Did I want my car looking over before the all-important trip? The last thing I needed was a breakdown on the way to the hospital … I thanked him and got filters, plugs and points changed at a very reasonable price. ‘Buon giorno Signor Teem.’ said old Marini’s wife ‘and how is your signora this morning?’
What a far cry from the kind of reception I had been getting a year before! Clearly, I thought, a child is the ultimate passport to society here, a blank cheque to draw against vast reserves of Latin sentiment. Far from having my greetings rejected, I now had the opposite problem of having to discuss the relative merits of the various local hospitals with the vaguely mongol-looking woman, while the woman with the twig broom came to clap me on the back and tell ghastly stories about the gynaecologists at Borgo Roma where her sister-in-law had given birth. ‘Macellai’, she insisted. ‘Butchers. They jump on your belly to push the child out. ‘And she asked who would be coming in to look after me while my wife was away at the hospital. I wondered for a moment if I had understood this correctly.
‘Chi ti cucinerà?’
‘Nobody, I can manage myself.’
She shook her head, whether in admiration, or despair at a changing world, I don’t know. ‘Troppo bravo, troppo bravo’, she said. ‘You English are so tough.’ And she added by way of valediction: ‘The full moon will be the night of the third.’
Inspired by the consultant gynaecologist who gave our prenatal course, we have decided to go to his hospital in the small town of Zevio. He appears to be the only consultant in the Italian state system practising the Leboyer method. Or so he says. Obviously, we’ve driven over there once or twice to check out the route: fifteen miles of twisting country roads, with the last stretch, unfortunately, being resurfaced and hence bumpy as hell. A useful stimulant perhaps, but also another complicating factor in that delicate equation: when to set off. We time the trip at thirty minutes. Getting out of the car to stretch our legs, we find a sleepy, overgrown village with a truly vast main square, in the middle of which is a villa-cum-castle surrounded by a moat. The rest of this inexplicably huge open area is just a desert of asphalt crisscrossed by fading white lines indicating where five or six roads might intersect. On Sundays, we discovered on our second trip, the space is packed to suffocation point with a bustling provincial market selling cheap clothes, fruit, vegetables, and adventurous underwear of mammoth proportions, presumably for ladies like Lucilla. The traffic was backed up for a kilometre and more. Another factor then, is that one must not go into labour on a Sunday morning.
The hot days drag on. We sit under the pergola at Centro Primo Maggio listening to the accordion. People with houses by the streams hang water-melons in the water to keep them cool. They’re too big for the fridge. Despite the predictable election results, the politicians, as Bepi predicted, have so far been unable to come up with a government. Nobody’s concerned. The shops begin to close as everybody goes off on holiday. There are the usual scandals about poor old people having to walk miles in suffocating heat to find a grocery open. By law, shops are obliged to run a rota system, but the fines are so small they tend to ignore the problem. You go to the post office and find it closes for the afternoon in July and August. There is alarmist talk about the unavailability of doctors in hospitals. We begin to get nervous.