UN RIASSETTO . . .

Can there be anything particularly Italian about a birth? We are driving fast across the flat country to the south of the village on a winter night. The contractions arrived very suddenly and were immediately fast and rhythmical. Earlier in the day there had been no warning whatsoever. So much so that we spent the afternoon in a dull office in the center of town while a solicitor read out the conditions of a contract of purchase at a price of one hundred and ten million, all of which had been fully paid. This for the authorities. To avoid some taxes. Then he read out a second contract that said that despite what had been said in the first contract, we still owed Righetti & Co. fifty million lire. This for us and while Michele examined the entire length of the skirting and Christ surveyed the scene with weary indifference from above a handsomely framed scroll declaring the solicitor's credentials (credential: “giving a title to belief or credit"—Chambers). This second contract, which is probably still in the glove compartment of the car as we drive cross country to the hospital, includes a self-destruct clause that says we agree to tear it up in the presence of the other signatories as soon as the money is paid. Hence there will be no record of what we really paid. With that safely settled and behind us, the poker faces of builder and credit-worthy solicitor broke into broad complicitous smiles and wished Rita auguroni—big wishes—for the birth of the child.

Which is now quite suddenly upon us.

It's a cold frost-hard night: patches of fog on a dark flat landscape, narrow empty provincial roads. Rita urges me to drive faster. She feels things are moving more rapidly than they should. But with the winter's heavy frost the asphalt is broken and potholed. The car shudders. At 100 kph it bounces fiercely. One can appreciate why Stefano switched to his funereal Passat. Rita cries out. And another bump. . . . It's an interesting question whether we're more likely to reach the hospital “in time” driving faster or slower. What kind of parameters would one need to know to work this out, I ask her. But she is rehearsing names again.

“Okay, so if it's another boy, we call him Filippo, right?”

“Right.”

“And if it's a girl, Stefania.”

Both names translate easily into English. No trouble for the relatives. Steer clear of Girolamo, Giuseppe, Amalia, and the like.

I'm already half wishing we had steered clear of Guglielmo . . .

“And if it's a marocchino?” Rita asks, mooting the notion of a possible infidelity with one of the Moroccans who walk the streets here selling rugs and tablecloths. Or if it has a peg leg and makes le corna? She tries to laugh, gritting her teeth at the same time, while I am reminded that we have still to see Nascimbeni about the new house insurance. Already children have made the man a staple in my life.

“Esposito,” I suggest. It was the name given to children abandoned at the church door, and it means, literally, “exposed.” As opposed, of course, to Protected, like all the other babies in the safely owned bricks and mortar of Nascimbeni's cautious world. There have been a spate of babies abandoned recently, usually and so sadly in the cassonetti, the big communal bins on the street where one has to take one's rubbish. And just yesterday a newborn fell through the lavatory tube of the Milan-Venice Rapido as it left the station of Vicenza . . .

But these are not helpful thoughts on such an occasion.

So I turn on the radio, just in time to hear a sentence so remarkable that despite our own dramatic situation, Rita and I make a point of remembering it. The late news on Rai 1, the main public station, announces the arrest of a killer whom it describes as: “un sicario di spicco molto attivo durante il riassetto degli organigrammi gerarchici della camorra negli ultimi anni ottanta”—a notable hitman particularly active during the re-equilibration of the organizational hierarchy of the Neapolitan mafia in the early 1980s.

Will our children ever learn how to speak like that? Do we want them to? And what kind of nation is it that speaks about its criminals as if they were just another large bureaucratic corporation?

The car hits a pothole. At the same time, we have to hear of yet another case of polio in Naples because people haven't been bothering to vaccinate their children. And gypsies have been stealing little girls again and selling them as prostitutes . . .

“Basta!” Rita says. She switches it off.

“Childbirth is entirely natural,” I insist as we hit another bump. Car transport less so.

We cross the river Adige and arrive in Castellano. The hospital has all the welcoming features of a mental institution built in the twenties: gloomy stone-paved corridors and special public-sector lighting effects, though at least it is easy to park when you arrive after midnight. In the porter's office a man is busy watching dancing girls on TV and waves us vaguely along the corridor toward Maternità.

We are welcomed in a tiny office by a little nun with glasses, who sets about filling in a long form, steeped in precisely the kind of vocabulary we have just been laughing at on the radio. Rita tells her that she thinks the matter is getting somewhat urgent, the contractions are fierce, but the nun very correctly points out that the form will have to be filled in first: age, place of birth, parents’ occupations, place of residence, phone number, first or second or whatever number offspring. The office is a cupboard with two chairs, a desk, and the inevitable framed certificates testifying competence.

Rita groans and complains that things are getting very serious indeed. She still has her big brown overcoat on. And, “O Dio,” she gasps at a particularly brutal contraction.

Particulars of first born. Nature of presentation. Weight at birth. Miscarriages in the intervening period. Date of last menstruation. Results of tests undergone since then. Data of own birth. Profession. The list seems endless.

“O Diol” Dr. Maroni, as I recall, did not tell his class how to get into self-hypnosis while filling out a form.

Address, postal code, phone number (work, home) . . .

Finally, we are directed down a corridor past a full-size white stucco statue of Our Lady to the delivery rooms. Since Rita has gone to Maroni's class, we get the new super-modern, politically correct room, the advantage here being that this place has none of the heavy equipment, the complicated gear, and the leg straps that make a normal delivery room look like an emergency ward in Bosnia. No, here there is nothing more than a big double bed with plenty of pillows to be arranged at will. The light is low and pink, suitable one imagines for brothels, though the music would hardly be popular: Vivaldi's Concerto in Re Maggiore for Two Mandolins.

Since we actually have a very similar bed at home, not to mention a quantity of pillows and cushions and the facility for generating low red light and the Deutsche Grammophon version of this particular concerto (how else would I have recognized it?), it occurs to me that we might very well have stayed at home and saved ourself the nun's interrogation. Though in the event of trouble, the helicopter might find it difficult to locate our part of Via Segheria, since there are no streetlamps yet.

At home, I reflect, a husband might know what to do. Or, more pertinently, where to go when there was nothing for him to do. This is not the case in the hospital. In the hospital one is obliged to play the role of the modern husband supporting his wife at birth, and this is particularly important in Italy, which has only recently discovered such healthy concepts (the range goes from gay rights to bottle recycling) and thus practices them with the eagerness of the neophyte.

But what exactly is a man supposed to do at his wife's childbirth, apart from be there wondering what to do and holding her hand if it helps? Which I am abruptly told it does not.

“Let each one of us say unto ourselves . . . ,” I begin in a low voice, as Rita settles on the bed. “I am calm, I am serene. . . .” But this only makes her giggle, in the middle of a long groan. Annoyed, she sets about breathing deeply.

The nurse arrives, a dark local girl who speaks a fierce dialect and carries a clipboard and another form to fill in, a form that in many ways, too many ways, resembles the first, it being a principle of bureaucracy, I suppose, that no person can be believed until he has answered the same question in the same way at least three times.

“O Dio!” Rita shouts. “I think it's coming.”

“They all think that,” the nurse says complacently. The least, one feels, a husband might be able to do is to fill in the form while they get on with the business of childbirth . . .

But now it's the nurse's turn to scream O Dio, because the baby is indeed arriving. She rushes to the cupboard for rubber gloves, scissors, cotton wool, and the like (one presumes). Boxes and cellophane packets spill from a high shelf onto the floor. “O la Madonna, “ she screams (not inappropriately now), dropping everything, then remembering she has to press an emergency button to call the doctor. By the time she has fumbled her gloves on, the baby has already arrived and is kicking and whining and dirtying the sheets.

I only pray that my newborn child will always be able to deal so peremptorily and effectively with bureaucracy in the future. Here is a re-equilibration of the organizational hierarchy, if ever there was one.

But Dr. Maroni, when he arrives, is furious. However natural childbirth may be—and this performance was close to perfection—a doctor is supposed to be present. That's the law of the land. Was it my wife's fault or the nurse's?

Rita isn't listening. She's simply delighted that it's a . . . bella bambina: Stefania. Within five minutes of its birth the child has already been smothered in diminutives, many invented: Sinfolina, cicciolina, ciccina. . . . It must be one of the areas where Italian most excels: the cooing excited caress over the tiny creature, uccellina, tartarughina.. . . Little birdie, little turtle. Rita is ecstatic.

“What was your other child?” the nurse asks me, trying to divert the conversation away from the late arrival of the doctor. “A boy,” I tell her. And what's the age difference? Two and a half years? “Excellent,” she smiles, “he'll bring older boys home for her, and she younger girls for him. The boy should always be older . . .”

Who would bother arguing with such conservative ideas at such a moment? Invited to cut the umbilical cord myself, I decline. I'm overawed, and nervous and a little squeamish. Just at the moment I wouldn't trust myself with a pair of scissors.