DU BI DU DAN

Announcing the opening of the town-hall-cum-school in 1894, the local newspaper could not have praised the architecture more highly: “a grandiose, elegant modern building, well-provided, especially in the schools, with all the necessary comforts and hygiene requirements.”

He used the plural, “schools,” because while the main body of the building, “in simple style with ashlar facing,” was to house the town hall, the two lower buildings forming a U around the courtyard behind were to house the girls in one and the boys in the other. For those were the days when the sexes weren't even allowed to mix before puberty. It reminds me of the oddity of my own upbringing, where we were allowed to mix before puberty at elementary school, when we didn't really want to, but not afterwards at secondary school, when we did, and of course what one fears sometimes is that one's whole life has been conditioned by such bizarrerie.

The first part of the ceremony now over, we file round the back of this “grandiose modern building” to the spacious courtyard and the children . . .

The children. How easily they get forgotten in events of this kind! So far, apart from the prettily dressed girls pouting on the balcony, we haven't seen any of them. Nobody has complained. Now, as we round the corner, there they all are in a great phalanx in the middle of the courtyard, ready to do their stuff. And with surprising efficiency, the band members are already sitting on their chairs beside them, spirited through the main building presumably while we walked round. The amplifier has likewise been brought through, so that already the speeches are beginning again. The headmistress. Again. The president of the district. Again. The councillor under investigation (he is refreshingly brief). Old teachers at the school.

Copying their parents, the children chatter and ignore the whole thing. Without even lowering his voice Stefano explains to me that when he was a kid, in the early fifties, they celebrated the school's birthday every year. And all kinds of other birthdays, too: the president's, the republic's. They had oodles of these events. They were always standing in courtyards waiting to recite poetry. Stefano seems more amused at this than upset. But no, he doesn't remember a single poem . . .

We're jerked out of our conversation by a bell. The caretaker, the oldest member of staff at the school, is waving a handbell around to show how he used to announce lesson changes some twenty years ago. Then some old pupils of times gone by are invited to the front and given a “diploma” while the band plays “Oh, When the Saints” with creditable vigor.

How Italians love diplomas, commemorative documents of every kind! Diplomas for having gone to a skating course, for having taken part in a volleyball competition, for being present at the inauguration of some institution or other. It's rare to do anything in a group in Italy and not end up with a diploma. Perhaps they like them so much because these fancy pieces of paper parody those documents that are so vital in Italian life and that, in the event, are so hard won: school finishing exams, your degree . . .

After the ex-pupils, the caretaker is called back, and he is awarded a diploma, too. A caretaker's diploma! It's a small red-orange scroll with a white ribbon tied around. Very attractive. He smiles, laughs, nods, but thankfully refuses to “take the floor.” Instead, he waves his diploma in the air and returns clownishly to his place, receiving great cheers from the children.

Now at last we are to hear the poem that Michele has been reciting so irritatingly for the past week (without my ever really listening). The centenary poem. But not all the kids, it turns out, will get a chance to say it. Six have been chosen, and each will recite a few lines, passing around the microphone.

The poem is written in the local dialect, and since this is brutally adenoidal and earthy, it always seems funny in the mouths of children, like watching a toddler trying to use a crowbar. In any event, it's the dialect poem that gives us the day's first attempt at humor, the first retreat from the facade of civic piety.

“Our school is an ‘undred year old,” a very small chap begins, “but bearin’ up well despite all ‘er colds.”

A girl with chubbily trembling knees goes on to suggest that a little beauty treatment of the poor lady's cracked and yellowing old skin would not come amiss. But since they can hardly take her to a health clinic, whispers a bespectacled little boy, the pupils will do their best to keep her young at heart. Then a very self-assured young maiden explains that if the school ever feels lonely, the children will always be there shouting and playing to cheer her up. But will always, interrupts another, give her a nice long rest in summer (clearly the poetess has equated the school with i nonni). Toward the end of fifty and more similarly cozy lines, the biggest boy in the oldest class is allowed the exclamation, “What a bore it is, ‘aving to study!” a line he shouts with great enthusiasm, raising a yell of support from the other pupils and thunderous applause from the parents, who for the first time this morning have actually listened to something.

Twelve o'clock is almost upon us, well-synchronized tummies are beginning to rumble. But just before we go we are to get an example of what I can only call the other extreme of Italian speech. . . . After the jolly, homespun, dialect poem, the main group of the children finally get their chance to do something. They are going to sing a song written by a teacher who goes by the noble name of Gino d'Arezzo. It is called “Imparare in Libertà"—Learning in Liberty.

I said sing, but I should have said chant. Gino comes out front to conduct them. There's a second's silence, then rather tinnily (after the band) some taped music rattles out. But this is only to give the children rhythm. The minute they start to shout their lines, the tape is lost. Gino d'Arezzo waves his arms urgently. The first verse goes:

Nella scuola il mto domani c'è

leggo, scrivo, studio: serve a me

dal sapere nascerà una nuova società

società -à -à -à -à-à-à-à-à!

Which rather depressingly translates as:

The school is my tomorrow, my future

Reading, writing, studying, it's so useful

From this knowledge born will be

A new society-ee-ee-ee!

Gino is obviously the kind of fellow who in English would be rhyming words like “ebony” and “ivory.” The second verse goes:

Nella mente tante cose già

ideali ricchi di bontà

la cultura non sarà fonte di rivalità

civiltà-à-à-à-à, questa è civiltà

This, in a now very poor translation, might go something like:

So much already in my mind

Fine ideals good and kind

Culture won't breed competition

Civiliza-a-a-shun. That's civiliza-a-a-shun!

I must confess I wasn't ready for this. I feel thrown. Rather than being filled with fine ideals, my mind becomes the setting for a three-cornered tussle between hilarity, embarrassment, and depression. The poem is awful, infinitely worse than the church choruses I remember singing as a child—"Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight,” and so on. Perhaps the problem is that Gino's piety is not even underwritten by a formal religion, with all that religions imply in terms of mystery and our not really understanding the world: Sant’ Eurosia's miracles, appearances of the Madonna, and the like. No, Gino, his poem suggests, has it all worked out: One simply needs to be good and to tell the children to be good (and look to Europe). But the little boys and girls do belt the words out with such enthusiasm that one can see how Gino might imagine his percorso didattico is working.

Civiltà-à-à-à, questa è civiltà-à-à-à! The children holler and clap. It reminds me of those well-marshaled groups of Chinese children one used to see repeating (presumably) idiocies about the advantages of communism. And the text itself is not far off the kind of thing I occasionally used to tune into on Radio Tirana in the good old days when nearby Albania was still a museum to Stalinism. In fact, the next verse of the poem is going to mention the formation of The New Man, which was always one of Radio Tirana's obsessions when they weren't reading reports from The Black Book of Western Imperialism.

But before we get to that, the song is interrupted by a kind of chorus. For this is an extremely modern song/poem/chant with a rap beat, and now in the middle the kids all break off (so that one hears the tinny whine of the tape again). With perfect timing, or almost, they shout: “O! O! O! DAN, DAN, DAN, DUBI DAN DAN!”

This is repeated several times, the dubi, written as spelled in the Italian copy of the song, which I later got hold of, being presumably some kind of corruption of Sinatra's “do be do be do . . .”

“O! O! O!” they scream. “DAN, DAN, DAN, DUBI DAN DAN!”

The hollered doggerel is actually something of a relief after all those serious thoughts, if only because the children are getting off on it so much. One small girl, a lovely, solid little creature with two pretty blonde pigtails and a rumpled skirt, is going almost crazy in the front row, jumping up and down in manic Muppet fashion and bellowing the refrain. “DAN DAN DUBI DAN DAN!!!”

The third verse is a little harder to catch, since half the children are still chanting “dubi dan dan” while the others recite the words. But, as I say, I later found that copies of the poem were sensibly provided in a handout:

Ogni bimbo studiera

O!—in completa libertà

O!—solo questo basterà

ed un uomo nuovo si farà-à-à-à-à

The nearest I can get to this is as follows:

Every child will stud-ee

Oh!—in total libert-ee

Oh!—this is what it will take

The new man to cre-e-ate.

In defense of the rather lame half rhyme “take/create,” I can only invite the reader to observe how easy it is to rhyme in Italian (in this case merely by using the same inflected verb ending) and how miserably difficult in English. However, the thinking, if such it can be considered, is clear enough. Encouragingly, when the children repeat the verse after another round of dubi dan dan's (I should have said that all the verses were repeated), more than one little boy, and I suspect my Michele is among them, has begun to replace the words uomo nuovo (new man) with the rather less nebulous concept uovo sodo (hard-boiled egg).

Oh—this is what it will take

The hard-boiled egg to cre-e-ate.

My father-in-law once told me that when as teenagers he and his schoolmates had to sing the many fascist songs at the Saturday morning gym sessions Mussolini instituted, they always changed the words to make them ridiculous, even those who were eager supporters of fascism. It's as if such songs naturally invited their own parody.

But this is speculation. More to the point is that the headmistress has announced that our revels are now ended. The band winds up the event with a lively tango, a tune one can only assume they usually use at rather different occasions. “Thank God for the band,” Stefano observes as we file into the school for our well-deserved snack. “Without them . . .”