FACCIAMO LE CORNA

Contrary to popular belief, then, the Italian child is born not into a splendid world of spontaneity, fun, and sensual delight, but into a tight space of immense caution, inhibition, and a suffocating awareness of everything, but everything, that can go wrong. Not to mention how much it will all cost.

It was thus that I was persuaded, by solemn neighbors and employers, and of course my concerned father-in-law, that if I insisted on having a second child (folly became madness when we arrived at a third), the time had come for me to take the whole question of insurance more seriously. My accountant agreed, remarking that in terms of tax relief I would save only the equivalent of about forty dollars a year by having another bundle of joy (there is no Child Benefit in Italy). He pointed out the advantages of being able to reduce my taxable income by the few million lire I would pay into an insurance scheme, and he recommended, as Italians in their eagerness to do favors always will, someone I could go to: an agent, Ragionier Nascimbeni. Since Nascimbeni means “well born,” I decided to take this as a good omen.

I telephoned Ragionier Nascimbeni. Generally, it is not easy to make appointments in Italy, since it is important for the person offering a service to appear to be extremely busy and hence successful. Any shortcomings in the service, in terms of slowness, will thus seem to be a guarantee of its qualities. I have even had a courier service in Verona tell me that they cannot come to pick up a package for forty-eight hours because they are so busy, and of course they are so busy because they are so fast. It seems pointless arguing with such logic. Nascimbeni, however, and to his immense credit, must be one of the most amenable men in the world. He was extremely, yes, extremely busy, there was simply no point in my going to his office, where he was “under an avalanche of work,” but he would come to our house immediately he had finished for the day. Yes, that very evening. Would nine-thirty be too late? I was suitably impressed.

Ragionier Nascimbeni (ragioniere means accountant, or more precisely, someone who has completed the kind of high school that concentrates most of all on accountancy. It does not mean that the person in question is a full-blooded accountant, since that would entail a university degree, which would confer the more enviable Dottore. Ragioniere is thus the least impressive of those titles—Ingegnere, Avvocato, Architetto, Professore, etc.—that Italians like to place before their names to confer a little importance and pomposity, in this case so little importance and so hollow a pomposity that one feels it might be wiser not to draw attention to the fact at all)—

Ragionier Nascimbeni arrives right on time. I buzz him in and stand outside the door at the top of the marble stairs to guide him to the right apartment. He comes up with an unusual clatter, a curious rolling gait. I watch with interest as he attacks the first flight, disappears, then sways into view on the second. By the time I'm face to face with him at the top of the fourth, I'm beginning to appreciate why this man is genuinely so busy and successful in his field: He is himself a walking advertisement for just how much can go wrong in life, the perfect contradiction of the happy providence suggested by his name. One look at Nascimbeni and you know you need insurance. And perhaps he comes to your house, rather than seeing you from behind his desk in town, just to remind you how difficult it can be for a man to climb stairs, to cross a room, to find a comfortable chair . . .

I said “walking advertisement,” but I should have said “lurching.” Nascimbeni has the built-up shoe of the polio victim. He throws his limp leg forward, leaning on it only when it is rigidly straight, bringing round his good leg as rapidly as possible. The impression is of someone negotiating a ship's deck in a storm. His eyes behind thick glasses squint severely. Every few seconds he blows his nose, breathing hard.

“Bella zona,” he says automatically of the dusty street outside, “bella palazztna, bell'appartamento. Molto bello.” His voice is nasal, obstructed, adenoidal. We offer him the sofa, but he would prefer to sit at a table. His leg isn't comfortable on sofas. Not the right position. Then he must take notes, of course. Yes, the kitchen table is fine. “Many a family I go where the kitchen table is the only surface to write on,” he laughs. No, he can't accept a coffee, his blood pressure is too high. Got to be careful. Had to have a bypass last year. Looking at him carefully, he doesn't look a day over forty. The baldness is premature . . .

“Bene, allora?” He has pulled out a notebook, a series of brochures, an impressive pocket computer. He puts his hands together in a pantomime gesture of attentiveness. Every few seconds a tic obliges him to twist his neck to the right, together with a slight down-and-up rotation.

I explain that we are about to have our second child, and we thought . . .

“Però!” he exclaims, which is as much as to say, Who would have thought—what courage! “Complimenti Signora,” he adds to Rita, smiling generously and blowing his nose.

Then he begins to expound his various life insurance schemes. “The point is, hmm, with my still being so young, hmm that if,” he hesitates, “if. . . .” He hesitates again, he looks at me across the kitchen table, squinting, smiling, “Yes, if anything should, er, happen to you. . . .” Immediately he says this, he lifts both hands from the table and makes two fists but with the forefingers and little fingers protruding and pointing upwards. “If anything should happen to you—-facciamo le corna—it's likely to be an, er, accident—facciamo le corna—rather than, er, an illness. Isn't it?”

Facciamo le corna, literally translated “let's make the horns,” refers to his gesture of the closed fists with pointing fingers at each side. For some reason, this is supposed to ward off evil luck. One might make it, for example, when seeing a hearse pass or contemplating the possibility of one's favorite soccer team losing a big match, or just at the mention, during dinner table conversation, of some normally unmentionable disease (pregnancy?). Ragionier Nascimbeni must combine expression and gesture, often simultaneous with the tic that twists his neck to one side, about a hundred times a day . . .

“Yes, I mean the most common cause of, er, yes, decease, among men of your age, is a road accident, facciamo le corna.”

And he does. The fingers point quite automatically but always eloquently from his two fists, accompanied by an apologetic smile. He is trying to explain to me, it seems, that it would be wise for me to take out a special kind of policy that would pay out very large amounts if something happens to me, above all in my car, and rather less, or at least in the early years, if I die a natural (that word again) death. But I am so mesmerized by his constant corna punching the air across the table that I'm finding it hard to concentrate. Without thinking, I ask, “And do they pay out if it's the result of drinking?”

“What?”

“If I'm drinking and driving. Or, I don't know, if I didn't have my safety belt on and should have. Would they pay just the same?”

He looks at me with the concern of someone whose job is to be understanding but who finds this difficult when he hasn't understood. It's something to do with my being a foreigner perhaps. Then he gets it. He laughs. “For heaven's sake, nobody ever checks whether anybody's been drinking and driving when there's an accident! O Dio, no.” Then he frowns. “Actually the insurance companies are presently taking the government to court precisely because they don't enforce the drunk driving law. But not so that they can avoid paying out. Oh, no no no, per l'amore di Dio. But because if the government did enforce the law, there would be fewer accidents, there would be fewer sad occasions on which they were obliged to pay out . . .”

“Ah.”

“Now, where were we, yes, accidents. Hmm. Yes, so if, on the other hand,” he picks up his thread, “if you should, er, be, er, be disabled in some way—facciamo le corna, then the . . .”

Smiling, Rita intervenes. He doesn't need to beat around the bush so much and keep making his corna. We know that insurance is about illness and death. We just want the appropriate coverage for the children. We're doing this for the children.

Ragionier Nascimbeni squints at her through his thick glasses, then relaxes. He has a round, pleasant face, rounder still for that receding hairline. He seems relieved. There are many houses he goes to, he explains, where people actually get angry if he even uses the word death, because they think it can bring them bad luck. He blows his nose. It is almost the hardest part of his job, he says earnestly. Blowing his nose yet again, he apologizes that he suffers from allergies, against which, it seems, one cannot insure.

Much cheered by our non-superstitious attitude, he now proceeds more brutally. Yes, my most likely death would be in a car accident, though he can't imagine that I drink and drive, ha ha, hmm, anyway, no, in the event of such an accident, I, or rather, he laughs apologetically, no, my wife or children, would receive exactly, under this particular policy, four times the amount I would get by death from illness. Good. Well, if one accepts this kind of policy, there is no need for a medical. If one wants a larger amount for death by illness, then one has to accept a medical. He looks up sadly: “Not because we imagine you are trying to trick the company, already having an illness and not saying anything, but just in case, facciamo le corna, you have a condition without being aware of it.”

Holding back my laughter, I ask him if he has children, and if so what provision he has made. I do this because an article in Il Sole 24 Ore, the financial paper, once suggested that the best way to deal with any investment or insurance agent is to ask them how they behave. They know all the best deals. Nascimbeni, however, shakes his head. He and his wife long ago decided that children were too risky a business. Too many things can happen. But having said this very solemnly, he suddenly becomes aware that it could be understood as foreseeing bad luck for ourselves. Rita comes to his rescue. “Facciamo le corna,” she says. Out spring her forefinger and little finger. I'm stifling laughter. And at exactly the same moment Michele begins to cry in the other room—furiously, a great bloodcurdling yell. Nascimbeni comes out with a nervous cough, as if to suggest that our irreverence might somehow be responsible. He blows his nose again, and, as my wife goes off to get the boy, begins to talk about a saving scheme for children. One of the major problems with children, and again he deprecates the fact that he always has to be imagining problems, is that when they get to eighteen or so, one has to pay for their university education, which could last what, five, six, even seven years, and then help them to set up home when they get married, buy an apartment, and so on. Well, by paying a fairly modest amount monthly into an entirely tax-free investment fund, one can be sure that come their eighteenth birthday . . .

“Nobody bought me an apartment,” I remark. “We don't own this one.”

“No, of course not, me neither.” Nascimbeni twists his neck to one side and smiles. He looks about him, apparently appreciatively, at the window fittings, the quality of the tiles, the workmanship. “Perhaps you should buy it now. Or another apartment.” He hesitates. “I mean home ownership is the only way really to insure yourself against, er, against the event of eviction, which with young children, of course, would be, er, disastrous. Anyway, if you did want to buy a house, I would certainly be willing to help you with the mortgage . . .”

Rita walks through the room with Michele in her arms and takes him out through the French window onto the balcony. The cool evening air will calm him down. Outside on the street children are kicking a ball at each other, standing to one side every time a car races past. Not a situation, I imagine, that Nascimbeni would wish to contemplate. Except in business terms.

“And house insurance,” the agent continues. “In fact, there's one very interesting policy that might be of use to you now, in the sense that it covers not only against damage to household belongings, but any damage your children might do to somebody else, or their property. Imagine, for example, that your little boy, when he's a bit older, were to push that basil plant off the balcony so it fell on somebody's head. They could then sue you for damages, something this policy would cover, and the wonderful thing about it is that the premium remains the same however many children you have, so . . .”

When he has gone, we roll about on the bed laughing and facendo le corna at all the possible things that could go wrong, a satellite, falling on our apartment, the leaning Tower of Pisa collapsing precisely the day we go up, etc. Until it occurs to me that fare le coma can also mean to betray one's spouse (in the same way that, in Elizabethan English, horns were supposed to be visible, to the eye of faith, on a cuckold's forehead). Facciamo le corna could thus mean “let's betray your [or my] partner,” and people here actually say: “Yes, so and so is away again, no doubt putting horns on her poor husband. . . .” Though one could hardly accuse poor Nascimbeni of having meant this double entendre. On the other hand, it is an eventuality against which no meaningful insurance cover can be offered. As with almost all the serious things in life.

I remember some years later the shock of recognition when, upon warning young Michele that by the time we got to the pasticceria there might not be any chocolate croissants left, he raised his two chubby fists, shot out forefinger and pinkie, and earnestly declared, “Facciamo le corna, Papà!”