And then the big day arrives at last. Or rather night. Towards two in the morning the terms of the equation are finally and ruthlessly satisfied: fierce contractions. We bundle into our despised orange car and head south across the bassa to Zevio. We’re about half-way — San Martino, Campalto, Mambrotta — driving along roads that twist and turn unaccountably through perfectly flat countryside, when, over a distant dike, what should sail up into the sky but the moon, a perfectly round, splendid, shining white moon, full as full can be, and apparently drawing us to Zevio as the natal star to Bethlehem. How infuriating! I can just see the satisfied smirk on the face of our lady of the twig broom. Even Giampaolo will consider it as confirmation of his prosecco-bottling technique. Yet one feels strangely satisfied to see it too. La luna. So bright! So large! We speed on through field after field of silvery peach orchards under that presageful ghostliness lunar light tends to have, especially at important moments in your life. And it does cross my mind for a moment that perhaps the moon has more influence in Italy than it does back home. This would explain so much.
The Chiarenzi hospital in Zevio has long corridors paved with cheap black stone. The porter gives a direction with his thumb, barely looking away from a TV screen. In a spare room, a nurse with nun’s headgear takes down the details. Then more corridors. At the entrance to the maternity ward a little waiting area is heaped with flowers and there is a small white statue of the Madonna. One gets to rely on her after a while: that simple passivity, absorbing all, at crossroads, hospital wards, cemeteries. Although somehow, through her very ubiquitousness, the quiescent figure becomes not so much a protecting presence as a reminder that, whatever happens, all will go on as before. Without her and her crucified son, usually much smaller and hidden away by some dusty central-heating pipe near the ceiling, you might imagine that what was happening to you here and now was unique, and desperately important.
Rather surprisingly, I find myself wondering if the Madonna doesn’t have some quality in common with the moon.
In the ward, a bright young nurse speaks to us in dialect and listens to the baby’s heartbeat through a wooden trumpet pressed against Rita’s belly. Interestingly, she is called Stefania, which is the name we have chosen if the baby is a girl. Which no doubt it will be. I’m pretty well resigned to that now. Not that I in any way mind having a girl. On the contrary. What could be more delightful than a little girl? Just that I had hoped the Via Colombare influence would not be confirmed. I’d far rather have a random world than a determinist one, however benevolent.
We spend the night in a tiny room with Rita in labour and me fighting sleep. Enticingly, there’s a pasticceria right across the street which will surely open at seven o’clock. Shortly after dawn, while a crow sits on a branch not a yard away, a priest leads four men carrying a rough wooden coffin out of the hospital into the street. I decide not to remark on this to Rita. And when a light goes on in the pasticceria around eight o’clock, I selfishly hurry out for a cappuccino, only to hear that the bar is closed for holidays. The man has merely come to do some decorating work. And the pasticceria the other side of the village is always closed Monday mornings. A test of the extent of your Italianisation is whether you still grind your teeth when you hear that something is closed.
In the event, the low lights and soft music of the Leboyer method have to be forgotten because that room is already occupied. ‘Full moon’, explains the nurse. ‘Haven’t had a birth for a week and then six in a single night.’ OK, OK, I give in. But the baby, when it finally shows up, is a big bouncy boy. We are both delighted.
The first duty of an Italian father is to buy a rosette, blue for a boy, pink for a girl, and stick it on some highly visible part of his house. Driving home that day, I found a tabaccheria in San Martino that sold me one for what seemed a rather expensive 10, 000 Lire. The lady at the till was desperately eager to engage me in conversation about the joys of parenthood: ‘Sì, sì, sì, a great change in your life, you can’t even imagine yet,’ she says excitedly as I walk out in a daze without my receipt. Back in Via Colombare I taped the thing high on the front door of number 10 and hoped that all the zitelle in the street would see it immediately and eat their hearts out.
My second duty was to find two witnesses and take them along to register the birth. Since public offices are only open in the morning, this would have to wait till the following day. Giampaolo and Orietta were more than happy to help me out, and we set off early next morning so he wouldn’t be too late for work.
Registration had to be in the village of birth, so it was back along the winding road to Zevio again. The comune was a baroque palazzo in the huge main square where traffic crisscrossed with impressive confidence across the open asphalt. At the top of flights of eighteenth-century stairs, a huge room with ornate ceiling and a long wooden counter was occupied by just two women toying with computers.
The man who registered births was out for a minute, they said. Could we wait?
I generally accept this kind of thing now. But Giampaolo looked at his watch. ‘We’ll give him five minutes,’ he said ominously. As with his behaviour over Negretti and his dogs, phoning the police at the drop of a hat, I was surprised by his immediately tough, legalistic, although always reasonable approach. ‘We have come to a public office’, he told the women calmly. ‘There is no queue, and hence no reason why we shouldn’t be dealt with immediately.’ Orietta tugged at his elbow. ‘Giampaolo!’ she muttered.
But after five minutes Giampaolo again politely demanded to be served. The younger of the women, lavishly if not seductively made up, fashionably if not attractively dressed, said the man couldn’t possibly be much longer. Giampaolo asked where he was. The girl flustered. Nobody had registered a birth for a week or so, she said. And then they were so pushed still with the aftermath of the elections. Surely we could understand that? But if we were really in a hurry then she would try to handle the matter herself. Her voice echoed petulantly in the big room, designed, presumably, for nobler purposes. A great chandelier gathered dust above a VDU. The lighting was fluorescent.
We were in a hurry, Giampaolo said. We had come early because he had to get to work. People noticed, he remarked pointedly, when he was absent.
The girl, clearly resentful of the fact that her colleague hadn’t budged, came over to the counter, pulled a huge book out from a drawer beneath and asked us for our documents: Giampaolo’s, Orietta’s, my own. But when she saw the British passport she shook her head. Was I the father? She couldn’t possibly take it upon herself to register a foreigner’s birth. And she turned to the older woman: ‘Do we have any special conventions with England?’ The other didn’t know. I suggested that the conventions would be the same as for all EC countries. ‘Is England a member of the EC?’ the girl asked her colleague. ‘Credo di sì,’ came a monotone response. But the girl shook her head all the same. We would just have to wait for il responsabile.
‘But where is he?’ Giampaolo returned to the offensive. ‘We have no intention of waiting here all morning.’
The girl looked to the woman behind for support. This dusty creature said sourly: ‘Running an errand at the hospital.’ And she wouldn’t look up from her keyboard.
‘Ring him up.’