There are times when life in Italy is the stuff of madness, when bureaucratic inertia or incompetence can drive a person to frenzy. There are times when it seems that nothing works or will ever work, and one comes to believe that one is in the presence of the miraculous, for no evidence exists that human intervention could or can effect change of any sort. Some days, officials of all sorts find their only joy in obstruction, and their attention to the smallest detail of rule or law is rigorous. Promises are made and not kept and progress seems an illusion.
But then, as on a cloudy day when the wind suddenly sweeps in from the south and tears the clouds to pieces, the heavens clear and Italy flashes in all its disorderly, humane beauty. Moments like this remind me that, even with all its enormous problems, Italy is still the only place I want to live.
Late in the fall I went to the States and, while there, airfreighted back to Venice a small desk of my late mother’s, a piece of furniture I’d grown up with, a slant-fronted, multidrawered chest of bird’s-eye maple, her sixteenth birthday present. A month later, when it arrived, I went out to the shipper’s office at the airport, where a secretary gave me the shipping papers and told me to take them to the customs office.
There, a young officer with a Sicilian accent and a custom-tailored uniform glanced down at the invoices and bills of lading. When he saw that I’d declared—entirely for insurance purposes—a value of $300, he did a fast calculation and told me I’d have to pay 300 euros in customs duty. I explained that the declared value was an invention and that the desk had only sentimental value. He seemed uninterested in this and repeated the sum of 300 euros. I lowered my voice, put a sentimental throb into it, and tightened my eyes as if at the memory of great pain. “But it belonged to . . . mia madre.”
He looked up as if startled to discover that someone who’d come to the customs office could have a mother.
“Sua madre?”
“Sì.”
He glanced down again at the paper I held out toward him, but the figures were still there. I asked if it would help matters if I changed the declared value of the desk. All I had to do, I suggested, holding the paper toward him and pointing to the figures, was move the decimal point one place to the left and add a zero. That would change the $300 to $30.
He studied the paper, considering what he’d just heard, looked up, then studied my face for an uncomfortably long time. Shaking his head, no doubt at the shocking boldness—to make no mention of the criminality—of my suggestion, he took the paper from me, excused himself, and went back into the office from which he had emerged, leaving me to wonder what the fine was for customs fraud and if they’d also get me for attempting to corrupt a government official.
After a few minutes he emerged from the office, the paper still in his hand. I looked up, smiled weakly, fully convinced that I would have to pay the consequences, as well as the customs duties. He raised the paper in front of him and, with a gesture as gallant as it was elegant, ripped it in two lengthwise.
“The chest belonged to your mother, Signora, and so there are no customs duties to be paid,” he said, arms spread, the two halves of the paper fluttering from his hands like the shredded flag of an enemy captured in fair battle.