FARE FESTA

Imagine a dull afternoon late February. The doorbell makes you jump. You pick up the intercom, ready to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses that you don't want to discuss the end of the world, you believe it happened long ago. Or it could be Righetti, who has a way of turning up at the most inappropriate moments asking for that rent on his garage that was supposed to be a mere formality but now turns out to be deadly serious, especially since we're now supposed to buy the thing but can't afford to. Far from keeping the price steady, as pledged, he has increased it in line with the general property boom, naturalmente. We forgot to get him to write something down. He claims never to have made any such promise.

The intercom crackles, but no one is there. “Chi è? Chi è?” Nobody. Children mucking around, you think, more relieved than angry. You're just putting the thing down when from far away a voice calls, “It's us!” Because what my in-laws do is get out of the car and ring the bell, to get gate and door buzzed open, then go back to the car to unpack. But this is also a call for help. They will have lots and lots of things to carry.

I run down with Michele, now five years old perhaps, clumsily quick and wildly excited at the prospect of an unannounced visit from those great, if only occasional, benefactors, his grandparents. Outside a freezing twilight is stiffening to fog. The garden is a huge trench, because after repeated flooding a solemn condominium meeting decided to link all the drainpipes from the gutters to the central sewage system. This is illegal for some reason I don't understand, but common practice, not to worry.

Nonno Adelmo, my father-in-law, drives an ancient Ford Fiesta, bought secondhand when he and Nonna Maria returned to Italy to retire some years ago. Despite boasting that this remarkable car has done more than 300,000 kilometers, Nonno would clearly like something more comfortable. Nonna, however, still lives in a post-war mentality where things that work have to be made to go on working, and on and on and on, just as food on the plate has to be finished, not thrown away, and just as the rather unattractive fruit from the old trees they have on their acre of land in Pescara has to be gathered, to the very last sour plum and pippy grape, and given to friends and relatives and even the merest acquaintances. Thus as well as having to drive an ancient car, Nonno now has to fiddle in the back of it to tug out two big crates of homemade jams—fig, apricot, and medlar—plus bottle upon bottle of laboriously prepared tomato preserve for pasta.

The curiosity about Nonna Maria is that she mixes this obsessive peasant parsimony with a flamboyant love of style. Her father was a cinema projectionist in Rimini; she grew up with the fashion-saturated films of the twenties and thirties. Early photographs always show her assuming extravagant poses, perhaps draped over the parapet at the sea-front or simpering beside some monument in Rome, her fine-boned face set in a smirk of insuperable complacency. Even now, stepping out of this ramshackle car at almost seventy, she is wearing a wide-brimmed green felt hat with a big pin and an attractive shawl tied with a silver broach. The fact that both are battered and somewhat the worse for wear and tear gives her a decidedly raffish look in the thickening fog as she lifts Michele into her arms. She smells of sweet scents and applies makeup generously, frequently disappearing with Rita's perfumes and lipsticks when a visit is over.

It would truly be hard to exaggerate the cooing and crying and sighing and kissing and nose-tweaking and exclamations and tears and tickles and cuddles that now have to take place. The children must imagine they are the only people in the whole universe. Nonna lifts up Michele and dances round and round with him and, “O che bel bambino! O che ometto splendido! O che spettacolol” She holds him up to her hawkish face, rubs noses (losing some powder from hers), then swirls him round again, then crouches down to put her own old cheeks next to his. And now Stefi catches up, toddling and waddling down the path, and the whole extravagant process has to be repeated: the whirling in the air, the nose rubbing, the kissing.

It's what the Italians enthusiastically call fare festa a qualcuno, which, literally translated, means “to make a party of someone” and combines the ideas of welcoming them and smothering them with physical affection. Comparison of this expression with the slightly disapproving “to make a fuss of” speaks worlds about the difference between Italian and English approaches to such occasions.

“Michelino, look what we've got for you!” Nonno shouts, pulling more packets from the car. “Stefi, look what's here!”

Michele immediately frees himself from Nonna to run to Nonno.

“Are you mad, Adelmo?” Nonna demands. “The children will freeze if they start fiddling with their presents out here. Poveretti, they're both so thin!”

This is patently not true. Michele is nothing if not a hefty fellow. Already I'm asking him to ease up when he jumps off the sofa onto my neck as I read. Stefi shows every sign of being equally robust. In any event, the children have now grabbed two big presents from Grandfather and are fighting with the wrapping paper they always apply so attractively and efficiently in shops here, thus denying you the problem and pleasure of wrapping them yourself. Still protesting the children will catch their deaths, Nonna somehow grabs both of them, presents and all, and with considerable effort starts to heave and coerce them toward the house. As she sways up the front path in the fog, dragging them by their wrists, we can hear her launching into some story or other with her favorite expression: “Bambini, you know what my grandmother used to say? Do you? She used to say that little children should always . . .”

Nonno shakes his head, clearly annoyed that he is to be excluded from the present-opening scene that can only occur the very moment the children are through the door and Nonna frees their hands. Easier to keep a dog off red meat than a child from wrapping paper. He had obviously been looking forward to that.

“Good journey?” I ask, taking hold of a whole box of medlar jam, which I truly loathe. Nonno cheers up telling me that they found a service station with an excellent restaurant, just this side of Bologna. In that way Europeans have of getting back at us for our linguistic hegemony by inventing awful English words that aren't really English, the service station is called the Auto-grill, pronounced Owtoe greel. Apparently in no hurry to get indoors out of the cold, he finds his trilby and overcoat on the back seat, puts them on, then leans on the top of the Fiesta to enjoy a cigarette. “Women,” he sighs with extravagant eloquence, and already he is looking for that male complicity which can at once bind in-laws together while keeping the family as a whole in galvanized tension.

“By the way,” he says, nodding at the crate I've got stuck holding, “you don't need to eat that stuff. Just wait till we've gone before throwing it away.” I laugh, but to be on the safe side thank him just the same. He shakes his old trilbied head. Obviously, it hasn't been an easy journey. Foolishly, I ask why they didn't announce their arrival. “Women,” he repeats. “What do you want?”

It's his favorite and impregnable cover.

As we're walking to the house, in response to some imperceptible dwindling of the twilight or thickening of the fog, five globes of halogen ignite simultaneously in the garden. Mario and Silvio insisted that the garden must be lit, partly for the ornamental effect but, more important, to prevent intruders from creeping near the house unobserved. Nonno laughs at this ludicrous expense, as older Italians do laugh at their young before giving them everything they want. Under perspex fishbowls on meter-high poles, the halogen gives off the kind of blaze that blinds without illuminating. Even the trench collecting the gutters is thankfully invisible. The fog is suddenly thick as milk.

Upstairs, Stefi has run off to her room with a Sicilian doll and Michele is playing with a huge battery-operated jeep, clearly bought in the same auto-grill where Nonno and Nonna had such (they're still talking about it) an excellent lunch.

“Do you like your present?” Nonno flops on the sofa. He has taken his overcoat off but not his trilby. His body is remarkably spherical yet taut; he doesn't give an impression of flabbiness. More of a properly inflated balloon. Or serious salami.

“Do you like it?” he repeats.

Michele now finds time from having the thing crawl over a sofa cushion in reverse to say Yes.

“Your granddad bought it for you,” Nonno says. He scratches the baldness where the trilby rubs.

Michele plays on, fascinated by the lever that toggles forward and reverse gears.

“Do you like what your granddad bought you?” Nonno inquires.

After another pause filled with Michele's splutter and spittle—the noise the thing makes itself clearly isn't enough—Nonno again insists: “You wouldn't have had it if Nonno hadn't bought it.”

The boy doesn't appear to have noticed.

“Your nonno,” my father-in-law begins again . . .

“Michele!” I scream. I can't bear it. “Michele, for God's sake, say Thank you and give your nonno a hug.”

The little boy turns in surprise, his infant mind trying to make the necessary connections. Then he leaves his toy, rushes to his grandfather, kisses him, thanks him, and heads straight back to the jeep.

The scene reminds me, particularly as the February evening proceeds, of the surprise I experienced the first time I was present at Baldassarre family reunions; before, that is, I knew Italy or Italian or the Italians. For these people, mother and father, sons and daughters, all criticize each other endlessly, all and always have something to complain about, often bitterly, even resentfully; yet when they meet, when the Baldassarres are actually face to face, the gestures of affection, the extravagant fare festa, the gratitude expressed when gifts are exchanged, could not be more voluble or enthusiastic.

My wife embraces her mother rapturously. And her father. Michele watches them. Everybody does seem perfectly happy and delighted to see each other. The nonni are here! Evviva! Yet Michele is surely aware, even at five, that we complain a great deal about these unannounced trips, about not knowing how long Nonno and Nonna are going to stay, about the problems that arise if we have other guests. And surely when alone with his grandparents he will have heard them leveling all kinds of criticisms against ourselves, for they are nothing if not indiscreet. Then as we sit down together at table, everybody will talk critically about Rita's brothers, Uncle Berto here in Verona, Uncle Renato down in Rome, will complain of the former's love of expensive clothes he can't afford, the latter's tendency to send his mechanic's bills to his father. Why do these boys have to borrow so much? Why do they never pay back? Why do they apparently believe that everything is owed to them? Yet later in the evening, when Roberto arrives—orange Benetton sweater loosely tied round the collar of a Gianfranco Ferre shirt, beautifully creased wool trousers, shoes he might even now be trying on in some expensive store in central Verona—when Roberto arrives with his fierce mane of red hair and proud Roman nose, everybody will rush to give him those same rapturous embraces they recently gave each other, everybody will laugh themselves silly, handclapping, backclapping, hugging and kissing. Wine will be poured and then more wine, and Nonna, almost expiring with pride at having such a tall, handsome son, and a doctor to boot, will notice that there's only a “finger” left in the brandy bottle in the glass cabinet. And she will complain what poor taste it is to leave just a finger in a bottle of brandy, her grandmother always said never to leave a drop in the bottom of a bottle, it brings bad luck, though of course nothing good can be thrown out. . . . So then she will drink the brandy herself, she feels obliged to, or she will share it round, and the grappa too, seeing as there's some grappa, and everybody will be the best of friends, passing young Stefania from arm to arm and turning her upside down and picking Michele up to tickle him and toss him on the couch and so on, despite its being far too soon after their dinners for that kind of thing.

Yes, no doubt the children take all this in, this wonderful spettacolo of affection, this carefully choreographed festa. And perhaps somewhere deep down they are learning to associate it with the fact that they must remember to say a huge and quite extravagant thank-you to Nonno when he remembers to bring them a present, albeit picked up on an exceedingly full stomach as he staggered out of his favorite auto-grill. Yes, they must put on a good show of gratitude, they must give Nonno his reward and his due, then everything will be given and forgiven them, as everything is given and forgiven to Zio Berto.

I have often wondered, in this regard, whether Italians can really appreciate a story like King Lear. Why didn't Cordelia put on a bit more of a show for her foolish old father? Surely that was wrong of her. For there are times when a little falsehood is expected of you and can be engaged in quite sincerely, because appearance has a value in itself; it indicates, precisely, your willingness to keep up an appearance. All the world is appearance. Cordelia was wrong. Equally, those heart-breaking modern American short stories in which family members finally and painfully confess to each other the sad truth about their infidelities and resentments can mean little in Italy, where people are instinctively familiar, from the kind of childhood Michele and Stefania are now enjoying, with all that unpleasantly and inevitably underlies our getting on together. They know this but are wise enough to put on a jolly good show and enjoy it.

“Don't send the children to bed!” Nonna protests. “It's so early! How can you do that? You know, Michele, my own grandmother always used to say how important it was for children to experience the fun of being up at night. She said that if . . .”

The children love this. Michele, like Gigi in that condominium meeting of two years ago, like children all over Italy, is helping himself to everybody's wine, grabbing pieces of a panettone left over from Christmas. The huge brightly red box, complete with silvering and ribbon, in which this insubstantial and rather dull cake was presented, speaks tinsel worlds. Another spettacolo. When I insist it's their bedtime and I've had enough of them, Nonna starts muttering about that notorious English coldness, that awful British reserve. Why can't the children have some more cake? Why can't they stay up? Listen to the poor things wailing! They don't want to go to bed. It's only nine o'clock.

But I long since learned how to get round this one. I lean over my mother-in-law's excessively perfumed shoulders and hug her. I tell her how wonderful it is to see her again, which actually it is. Then I tell her, laughingly, lovingly, to mind her own damn business. She responds well to this. She laughs. She admires a man who can be frank and speak his mind, she says. Then she entirely forgets the children despite their tortured yells as they're dragged away to the horror of a warm bed, and concentrates instead on telling Roberto how a doctor should behave. Because a doctor is a doctor, she suddenly announces very severely, and should cut a certain figure, even when he's a urologist.

Roberto looks at her with blank complacency, dipping panettone in his wine. He has no idea what she is talking about. So she has to spell it out: She was appalled, yes, totally appalled, in Pescara last summer when they brought a neighbor's relative for him to see, yes, for their son and doctor to see, about the poor man's prostate, and he, Berto, appeared in his bathing shorts. He saw the man in his bathing shorts! What a terrible loss of face. Her grandmother, Nonna Matilda, used to say that...

There is a commercial on Italian television that shows a young man in a supermarket queue buying onions, potatoes, vegetables various. The cashier, an unfashionably fleshy beauty, plumply pale under the blackest jet curls, asks the fellow if he is making a minestrone. “Yes,” he admits shyly. And what a sympathetic smile the dear girl has as she leans her big breasts forward over her electronic till to tell him not to forget the leeks. No, don't forget the leeks.... Her grandmother always used to say that leeks were the secret to a good minestrone.... Meanwhile, a caption floats up across vegetables whose generous roundness is somehow underlined by proximity to those breasts, to the effect that you always get the human touch in Conad (yes, Conad) supermarkets.

So now Roberto, having to hear for the thousandth time what his mother's grandmother may or may not have said about how doctors should behave, shouts, “Sì Mamma, sì Mamma, anything you say, Mamma,” but laughing, and just as both children return to beg a last glass of water and to go round kissing everybody again, he begins to recount a spoof of that TV commercial seen on some late night satirical program.

So, in the spoof everybody in the supermarket queue begins to say what their grandmother put in her minestrone, a huge list of vegetables, some of them most unlikely, with one customer insisting, against all reason, that the real secret to a good minestrone was . . . watermelon. Yes, watermelon, in the minestrone. An argument flares up, while other customers eager to be served and get along home begin to shout in frustration, until one woman cries out loud, “You know what my grandmother did? You want to know what my grandmother put in her minestrone? My grandmother pissed in her minestrone, that's what she did.” To which the woman's antagonist replies, “And my grandmother pissed in your grandmother's minestrone.”

Berto bangs his fist down on the table three times. Everybody laughs. Nonna included. Rushing off to bed, both Michele and Stefi are repeating “My grandmother pissed in your grandmother's minestrone, my grandmother pissed in your grandmother's minestrone” and giggling their little heads off.

Then Nonna draws a deep breath and, quite unembarrassed, insists that what her Nonna Matilda used to say was that a doctor, like a priest...

Berto covers his face with freckled hands showing a gold signet ring and gold bracelet. But for all this mock despair, just two minutes later he is bothering somebody else in exactly the same way his mother has been bothering him—with advice—though his appeal is to a different type of authority. No sooner has Nonno Adelmo cut himself a slice of panettone than Roberto begins to criticize and advise him about his diet, to tell him what, according to the latest research, he should eat and what he shouldn't eat, the dangers of obesity, his chances of heart attack. Nonno shakes his head as though in melancholy irritation with somebody who, like his wife, has understood so little about life he isn't even worth arguing with. But then only a few moments later it will be his turn to advise us, Rita and myself, that is, as to how we should proceed with some changes he feels need making to our apartment, tools we need to buy, a product that would be very good for protecting the shutters against weathering. Not to be left out, Rita responds by advising her parents against taking holiday makers in their spare apartment in Pescara over the summer. It tires them out so much. They would be much better advised to . . .

What Berto didn't mention when he recounted the story of the supermarket spoof was the caption that floated up at the end of it. For I saw the program, too. It said, if I rightly recall, “Conad, the supermarket where nobody minds their own business.” Well, nobody minds their own business in the Italian family, nor is expected to. Everybody's behavior is fair game for everybody else. Even the long dead grandparents of the grandparents are still there, having their say by proxy, turning in their graves, insisting on tradition. If the original Conad advertisement is effective, it's because it plays on a situation everybody recognizes. If the spoof makes people laugh, it's because things are just beginning to change.

Our family evening proceeds in a sort of merry-go-round of well-meant advice, every last word of which is just so much form, so much water off another duck's back. But these ducks swim in such water. They like to feel it running down their feathers. Toward eleven o'clock, after very generous embracing, Nonna and Nonno retire to the spare room upstairs and we to the main bedroom downstairs, while Berto retreats into the fog to buzz open the doors of his extravagant Lancia Thema, everybody thinking exactly what they like about everybody else.

These visits from the grandparents will last two or three days on average, though on arrival they often speak of staying two or three weeks. Perhaps this is just part of the show. Nonno gets up before seven to go out and buy fresh croissants for our breakfast, plus two or three newspapers to read, a gesture that scores very highly with me. It also gives him the chance to smoke a private morning cigarette. Not that he can't smoke inside the house, quite the contrary, but he doesn't like his wife to see him indulging, though of course she knows that this is why he goes out. After breakfast he takes the children to school or nursery and together with Nonna retrieves them in the evening. Then he buys them sweets and ice creams and cakes and toys while she fusses over them, her voice squeezing itself into little trills and warbles of affection that puff off into the emotional air as though shot through the hot fissure of one of those volcanoes that for all their furious activity never quite erupt.

One of these visits, I remember, coincided, most appropriately, with carnival time. Michele and Stefi were dressed up as Batman and Isabella Queen of Spain in costumes peer pressure forces you to buy ready-made and unwashable from Standa, the department store. Nonno and Nonna took them into town to see the carnival procession with all the floats and clowns and pretty fairies tossing caramelle through freezing February air into a sea of little angels and devils and Japanese robots and D'Artagnans and Tarzans, all wondering how exactly their costumes should inspire them to act. When hero and royalty came back, full of sweets and soda, it occurred to me there could be nobody better to take a child to carnival than Nonno and Nonna, nobody more profoundly in tune with the spirit of the thing.

Then, on the third or fourth morning, their own show is suddenly over. It's been a short run. They're leaving, as unexpectedly as they arrived: usual departure time, six-thirty A.M. You'll be fast asleep, and they'll wake you all to tell you they're off. The children stand flat-footed on icy tiles, rubbing their eyes. “Oh, but why do you have to go, Nonno? You promised you'd take us to the mountains. But you promised. Please don't go.” If the kids occasionally forget to say thank you, they have no trouble in playing this part. They love their grandparents so.

“I'm afraid,” Nonna bends down to whisper dramatically, “that we've got to go and see a person we've just heard is very sick.”

This is a monstrous lie, invented entirely on the spot and only because it is unthinkable for Nonna to disappoint the little ones with the simple truth, that these old folks have had enough of children and grandchildren for a while; they want to be home. “We're so upset to leave you, children,” she says, “but Zia Bice has been taken very ill. She fell down the stairs and broke her hip. We'll be back soon!”

Whether this final remark is true or not remains to be seen. But then it doesn't matter, since it's the impression being created now, at this very moment, that matters, not how the kids feel later when their grandparents don't in fact return. My in-laws are consummate politicians, issuing promises like pretend currency (and in this, perhaps not entirely unlike Righetti and his fixed price for the garage). It's an interesting debate afterwards between myself and Rita as to whether we should tell the children that there are no sick friends, no help to be given to a neighbor redecorating his house, no urgent consulting work that Nonno is doing for a building company, only two old people who want to be well thought of at a low price. Curiously, it's the cold old protestant Englishman who doesn't want to tell the kids, can't see the point. At least about one's grandparents one can cultivate illusions. They won't be around that long. When it comes to builders, on the other hand, it's very much a question of caveat emptor.