MAMMA

“Have you ever thought that the first word Jesus the Man-God ever pronounced was ‘Mamma'?”

One of the many publications the Frate Indovino tries to sell you through his calendar/almanac is Cara Mamma, “a marvellously illustrated volume that speaks to the heart about la mamma, that person the whole world esteems, whom children seek and love, the Bible celebrates, the saints venerate, churchmen honor, monks do not forget, nuns emulate, the suffering invoke, the poets sing of, writers exalt...”

What are all those images the children find along their walks if not a mother and her son, Hristo? And the first word, Cara Mamma tells us, the very first word that the one ever pronounced was the name of the other, Mamma!

In Italian, I shouldn't be surprised.

Cara Mamma also tells us things like: “When God realized his task was great, he created la mamma. . . .” And again, “Few children are worth what their mamma suffers for them.” There are color illustrations of yearning, generous faces—modern photographs or Renaissance Madonnas (often surprisingly similar)—and these are placed alongside embarrassing poems by the venerable likes of Pascoli, Ungaretti, and D'Annunzio: “Cry no more,” writes the latter. “Your favorite son is coming home!”

It is one of the curiosities of Italy that even in the heyday of feminism, even in times when the only child is left with his grandparents while Mother is off to work, the mamma mystique has lost none of its attraction and power.

At the scuola materna the children are always at work on what they call lavoretti, little practical projects, like making a basket of flowers with paste and paper, or a rag doll, or a pastry plaque in the shape of an angel with tinsel eyes. On Mother's Day, May 12th in Italy, Stefi's lavoretto is a piece of paper with her handprints all over it in different-colored paints. But the paint is not so thick as to obscure the poem that the ever serious Irma has had computer-printed on every child's paper:

Cara Mamma

quante volte ti arrabbi

vedendo dappertutto

le impronte

delle mie manine!

Scusa,

se anche oggi per la tua festa

te le regalo.

Conservale,

e un giorno ben lontano,

rivedendole,

ti ricorderai

quanto erano piccole le mie manine

quando cercavano le tue.

Dear Mummy,

How often you get angry

seeing the prints of my little hands

everywhere.

Forgive me,

if I bring them to you

even today, Mothers Day.

Keep them

and one day far in the future,

looking at them again,

you'll remember

how very small my little hands were,

when they reached out for yours.

It is noticeable that, as with family greetings, when it comes to the subject of mamma, reticence is not at a premium. “Earned emotion” is not an idea I have ever heard mentioned in Italy. Any extravagance of sentiment is legitimate. This seems to be as true of the great poets as of the minor. The following stanza of a poem by D'Annunzio is addressed to his mother, not to one of his many mistresses:

Ti scrivo qui, seduto al balconcino

della mia cameretta, in faccia al mare,

e bacio ogni momento il mazzolino

che ieri mi mandasti a regalare.

I write to you from the balcony

Of my room, looking out to sea,

And kiss and kiss the little bouquet

You sent me as a present yesterday.

Somewhat less eloquently, after a family argument that has to do with Rita and her brothers having forgotten to give Nonna a present on Mother's Day, Rita's father sends one of his circular letters to all his children, beginning with the all too stock expression: “Children, one only has one mother in this world, so I don't see why you can't . . .”

You never hear what would seem to be the obvious correlative: “One only has one father in this world,” perhaps because, as for the baby in his shrines by the roadside, this isn't quite true. You don't have a father at all. Joseph is merely a stand in. It's God who is the father, and that fellow's most distinguishing trait has always been his absence.

On Sunday Silvio rises at four o'clock in the morning to set off fishing. He likes to drive with friends twenty or thirty miles away and fish in remote streams. At six years old, his little Giovanni is clamoring to go with him but isn't allowed. Or invited.

My friend Stefano also loves fishing, though he spends most of his Sundays cycling. He and his brother put the bikes on the car, drive as far as Boscochiesanuova, then set off on grueling rides in the mountains panting right up to fifteen hundred meters in their fluorescent cycling strips. So Stefano claims. Marta, keeping Beppino from putting his fingerprints on the wall or his snots on the new crystal tabletop, remarks that it doesn't seem to be doing much for Stefano's paunch.

Now that his second child is getting old enough to cause trouble, Giorgio, my immediate neighbor, tells me he has been dreaming of leaving his safe job at the railways to collect and sell the rare fossils and minerals you can find in the mountains here. He would hunt for this or that crystal in the old quarries of Lessinia, for silver in the Carso . . . There is even a little gold, he tells me, above Turin. One would have to be away for days at a time, he explains, with a tent and a stove, and when you weren't discovering minerals, there would be mushrooms to pick, truffles to unearth, and chestnuts in November and December. All far, far from home. Giorgio's eyes are wistful. He knows he will never really leave his safe job with all its benefits, though he would probably love to be fired. For the moment he escapes from his children through intensive gardening. More exotic trees have been bought to replace those that died in last year's frost. An elaborate plan has been hatched to pass the sprinkler system under the main driveway so as to take in the tiny strip of grass beyond the garages.

Mario also gardens, not the main condominium garden like Giorgio, but his own patch at the back, which he has turned into an impressive display of shrubs, flowerbeds, and lawn complete with pergola and barbecue and an electric socket for the TV on warm summer nights. But his apartment is round the front of the condominium, while his private patch of lawn is the farthest away of all at the back. When he goes out to do some gardening, he is entirely out of sight and earshot of wife and child. He might just as well be off fishing in the watery Bassa or cycling in the rugged mountains or prospecting in Piedmonte. I have never heard him complain about this arrangement.

Of course, in England the women often do the gardening. But not here. Here it's the man's escape. Monks are famous for their gardening. On Sunday afternoon the gardens of Via delle Primule are a-buzz with radios commentating the soccer match; likewise, the strips of grit for playing bowls at Centro Primo Maggio, where Zia Natalina's husband spends his free hours. It's hard to spot a man with his child.

In the early and even late evening, when he might be at home with his wife and daughters (for the second baby was a bella bambina, too, and now a third is on the way), Righetti can be seen roaming round the various estates he's built, showing flats to eager young couples or collecting rents, for garages, taverne, cellars. But since the whole business about Hristo began, he hasn't bothered us. Hristo, it turns out, has left a wife and two children in Bosnia, the better to be able to provide for them. Everybody is very understanding about that. In reply to our threat of legal action, we have been told that if we insist, this will mean chucking the poor man out on the street, which is hardly Christian of us with him having all those mouths to feed.

In the pasticceria I commiserate with the artistic Iacopo on the mess his private life has become. He now rides a very big motorbike and is seriously into leather. He seems infinitely depressed. But no, he admits, no, there is no problem over access to his little boy. He taps his Raybans on the tablecloth, indicating that his time with young Sandro is no consolation. La visione del bambino is not his obsession. This is not America, and Iacopo is no Mrs. Doubtfire. No, the problem is that there is alimony to pay. Unable to make ends meet with his creative paintings, he is still doing things to order, which he despises. Portraits as always, of wedding couples, of mother and baby. . . . His new girlfriend, frighteningly slim and haggard and likewise into leather, looks old enough to be his . . .

“Mamma!” comes a shout from the apartment below us. Voices are raised. It's nearly midnight of a hot night in July. Time for Francesco to capitulate and surrender the double bed to young Gigi . . .

I take the children to see Robin Williams's Hook in a local cinema in Borgo Venezia. It's fascinating to observe how the story takes its spring from a father's guilt at not having spent enough time with his children. This is mildly ludicrous, you can't help feeling, in Italy, where there's simply no need to feel guilty about such things. Your children always have their . . .

“Mamma!” Stefi calls in the night. “Mamma!” As I'm awake, I get up myself and walk across the passage to see what the matter is. The little girl is on the lower of two bunk beds. “Cara,” I begin. “Mamma!” she screams. “I said I wanted Mamma.” The situation is almost symmetrical to the time Rita called out “Amore” from the kitchen and I was a fool to reply “Sì,” since it's obvious that when a mother calls out “Amore” without further specification, she is calling for her son. On this particular night it turns out that Stefi's merely afraid because there's a moth in the room. When Rita has finally woken up and got this information out of her, Papa has to go and kill the thing. Mamma refuses to do that.

“Chi chiama mamma,” announces the sibylline Frate Indovino, “non s'inganna.” In rough translation this might read: You can never go wrong when you call for Mamma.

Michele takes this proverb literally. Doing his homework, he shouts from his room: “Mamma, what's three times seven?” If I happen to be in the vicinity, I reply: “Twenty-one.” “No, I want Mamma to tell me,” he insists. “But I can do sums just as well as your mother!” “I want Mamma to tell me. MAMMA! What's three times seven?” From some distant balcony Rita calls, “Twenty-one!” And he is satisfied.

But what is it exactly that the Italian mother does to generate this extraordinary bond, this wonderful and wonderfully sick phenomenon that the Italians call mammismo?—and when they talk about it, they're at once complacent and concerned, as when they talk about the public debt, or about rampant corruption. It's one of those staples of Italian life you have to get used to. There's hardly much point in asking whether it's good or bad. In this sense it has the same status as British weather, or cooking.

Well, I suppose most of all what Mamma does is be there. Sabrina is there when Silvio is fishing, Marta is there when Stefano is cycling, Donatella is there when Giorgio is gardening. Mothers may be away at work during the week, but they are there during the weekends when Daddy isn't. Of course, you think, Why don't these women get furious with their husbands for not taking the children with them? The answer to that is that they don't want them to. They don't want the children to be out in the hot sun, in the cold air, they don't want the children to be over tired, to fall off a mountain, fall in the river, or, even worse, miss a proper meal. When a father does take the children out, on his return he will have to hear: “Oh, but he's exhausted, he'll be ill, oh, but look at the scratch on his elbow, look at the bruise on his knee, oh, but he hasn't eaten any fruit. Did he take a bidet when he . . . ?” A father taking his child out on a walk, on a trip, is a man on probation. His wife's thoughts stalk him everywhere.

For a mother isn't just always there but is always protecting. The roadside images show the woman with tiny child or dying man. In both cases her gesture is the same: the encircling arms.

“Don't run!” screams Francesca as Gigi dashes out of the house. “You can't run in this heat. You'll sweat!” Everybody knows that sweating is dangerous. Especially if there are drafts about. In blistering July anxious mothers close the last crack of the train compartment window to prevent their child getting a draft. Everybody else understands and sits there patiently, near dying of asphyxiation as the sun beats on the pane. Or in winter mothers lean out of windows waving woollen sweaters or scarves and hats. “You'll get cold, you'll catch your death. . . .” In a country where the windchill factor is unheard of, big boys set off in fur, mittens, and muffs, to walk the twenty yards round the back of the condominium to Papà's car, for the four-hundred-yard trip to school. Not surprisingly, hypochondria is rife. When Gigi doesn't want to go somewhere, he likes to complain of a pain in his knee. His parents rush him to hospital for tests.

Can hypochondria be extended to cover the morbid anxiety that one is in need, not only of medical attention, but also of cash? Believing one is ill and believing one is indigent are akin somehow and both closely related to one's relationship with . . .

“Mamma!” Zio Berto cries, embracing Nonna on one of those family reunions. They hug. Then she steps back. “Oh, but you've lost weight,” she protests. “Oh, but you're not eating well.” Her boy is thirty-four years old now and has his fiancée beside him. As he is leaving after dinner, she slips an envelope in his pocket with a million lire in it, though Nonno has sworn blind he will not give the children any more money. Why does the boy still need money when he's a doctor? But the old woman explains indulgently: “As my grandmother always used to say, ’All ‘amore dei figli, non c'è amore che somigli.’” To the love of children, no other love can compare.

Certainly not the love between husband and wife. In the Anglo- Saxon world, you might say, complicity traditionally, or at least ideally, resides in the relationship between the parents. In Italy it is crucially shifted toward the relationship between mother and child. “Don't tell your father I did your homework for you,” Marta tells Beppino, pulling his little ponytail. “He'd be angry with me . . .”

But beyond diet and swaddling and coddling and funding, Mamma has something else to offer: a suffused eroticism. All those beautiful Madonnas, all the embracing, all the games nearly naked in the summer heat, the family siestas on the big bed with the shutters closed against a scorching sun, the nights together with Papà relegated to the kid's room. When Nonna hugs Zio Berto, she squeezes hard and perhaps tickles him. There are no evasive euphemisms here for those dangerous parts of the body one always suspected as an English child could never really be mentioned to one's parents, since one's parents never spoke openly of them to you. Here everything is properly caressed, properly talked about, thoroughly tickled. “My soul full of desire for love,” writes D'Annunzio, “I think of your kiss, your trembling sighs, your gaze, your quiet laugh.” One can't imagine even the most sentimental Englishman writing such lines to his mother. On the other hand, it's not for nothing that Italy has some of the leading theorists in group psychotherapy for families, not surprising that some young men have an extraordinarily inflated, mother-fed opinion of themselves and what is owed to them. It can be tough on Papà. On the day I write this, the radio has reported the case of a boy who, when his father refused him the keys to the faster of the two family cars, hit the man repeatedly over the head with a hammer. Mother tended to give him what he wanted . . .

Yet in the normal way of things, all goes smoothly enough, despite some extraordinary situations. I first met Stefano and Marta before they were married, when I gave them English lessons as a couple. They both felt they needed it for work, he to read The Economist, she to deal with foreign customers in her shop. One day I was going through the routine household objects. What do you have in your bedroom, Stefano? Desk, chair, bedside table. . . . What do you have on the bedside table? Hesitation. Alarm clock. Ah, so, you use that for waking up? Pause. A little confusion. Stefano was already in his early thirties at the time. He already had his own business. Marriage to the girl he had known for fifteen years was just a question of when. “To wake up? No,” he smiled. “No, you see, I don't actually sleep in my bedroom. I sleep with my mother.” Not apologizing, but explaining, he added: “Always. Ever since I was a little boy, when Father died.” Marta did not seem at all embarrassed that this had come out. When, eight and more years on, we go over to visit them one Sunday afternoon and he's not there, I ask: “Cycling over the Alpine passes?” and she says, “No, he's gone to visit his mamma.”

“Oh, is she ill?” I couldn't understand why he'd gone without the family, or not invited his mother over to their place.

“No, he just wanted to spend the afternoon with his . . .

“Mamma,” Stefi shouts. “Yes?” I go through into the bathroom. “No, Dado"—my daughter calls me Dado—"I only want Mamma to clean me.”

There are some advantages.