Tim Parks - An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona

ALSO BY TIM PARKS

Fiction

Tongues of Flame

Loving Roger

Home Thoughts

Family Planning

Cara Massimina

Goodness

Juggling the Stars

Shear

Mimi's Ghost

Europa

Destiny

Savage Judge

Rapids

Cleaver

Nonfiction

Italian Neighbors

An Italian Education

Translating Style: English Modernists and their Italian Translations

Adultery and Other Diversions

Hell and Back

A Season with Verona

Medici Money

TIM PARKS

AN ITALIAN

EDUCATION

The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona

GROVE PRESS

New York

Copyright 1995 by Tim Parks

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parks, Tim.

An Italian education: the further adventures of an expatriate in Verona / Tim Parks.

ISBN-10: 0-8021-4285-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4285-6

eISBN: 978-0-8021-9114-4

1. Parks, TimHomes and hauntsItalyVerona Region. 2. Verona Region (Italy)Description and travel. 3. Verona Region (Italy)Social life and customs.I. Title.

DG975.V49P37 1995 945.34dc2095-1699

Cover artwork by Christine Berrington

DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Lucia

AN ITALIAN

EDUCATION

COCCO FRESCO

Cocco! Cocco!

It's a loud harsh voice from far away. At a quarter to nine the morning air is already vibrant with heat and light. Everywhere a steady brightness lies like a pressure on brilliant color.

Cocco! Cocco fresco! The voice is getting louder, and it's recognizably a pedlar's voice, theatrical and coercive, the hard double c extravagantly emphasized, the final o almost stretching to two syllables. A young voice pretending to be old and bold.

COC-CO-O! You can hear the banging of a bucket now, as if against a leg at every step. Cocco fresco!

It's a geometric world we're in. First and farthest away lies the sea, behaving well today, a flat, undifferentiated dazzle, barely wrinkling where it meets an almost white sand. Coming closer, there are twenty measured meters between the water and the first row of sunshades. Old folks walk briskly here, parallel with the shoreline, their sagging or angular profiles sharp against brilliance beyond as they take their tonic morning stroll down the never-ending beach.

The voice is growing more insistent as it approaches.

Cocco! Cocco fresco!

The sea, the strip of sand, and then the sunshades: great green-and-orange umbrellas on this bathing station, tall and wide, each two and a half meters from the next, twenty-four in rows parallel to the sea, fourteen in rows perpendicular, with one space at the midpoint of each row in each direction to form a pathway from road to sea, a pathway across the beach (so that seen from above one imagines a bright sandy cross dividing a huge flag of color). On the ground beneath the umbrellas, the sun, still low, though higher every minute, revolves slow pools of shadow around deck chairs and lounge beds, likewise green and orange. The sand is a rigidly patterned chiaroscuro where the early-morning bathers stretch their towels and unfold their newspapers, entirely ignoring the now imperative cry:

COCCO! Clank, clank clank. COCCO FRESCO!

A small child fussing in the sand with a spade says Cocco! in the sort of baby voice that repeats everything it hears. Cocco! He looks up from his spadework to where a lanky adolescent is now approaching through a blaze of light, a bucket clanking under each arm.

Bending to adjust the baby's sunhat, a woman's soft voice says, Yes, cocco della mamma! Which is to say, Mummy's little darling, Mummy's cuddly little man. But in perfect baby imitation of the young pedlar, now no more than a couple of meters away, the child shouts: No, Cocco! Then, Cocco fwecco! As if he understood.

The mother laughs, twists on her deck chair, and signals to the boy, who comes over with a grin. He is tall and straight with Latin-black hair and a smooth bare rather shrimpy chest already tanned to dark toast in early June.

How much? she asks.

He sets down his buckets on the sand, and now we can see the slices of white coconut swimming in water.

A thousand lire.

This is extortionate, but once again the child, rocking back and forth on his nappy and bright red shorts manages, Cocco fwecco!

Very clean, the pedlar knows to insist. He has a golden crucifix round his neck, three bracelets, an earring, a diver's watch, and a bright smile.

Va bene.

The deal is done. The boy pushes a crumpled note into the pocket of denim shorts and resumes his pedlar's cry among the sunshades. Meanwhile, the white coconut, whiter even than the light, dead white, is carefully washed from a bottle of still mineral water, then cut into tiny pieces so that a child can chew on itmy young child, Michele, gurgling in Adriatic light and heat, growing up Italian.

I remark to my wife, Rita, that where I was brought up, if you got down to the sea at 8:30 in the morning, you would freeze to death. But she is busy stopping Michele from picking up a crumb of coconut that has fallen in the sand. And now he's dug out a cigarette stub, too.

I remark that if you set up a sunshade on the beach at Blackpool, Lancashire, where I lived as a child, the chances are it would be blown away. Even with this huge cement base. And assuming you wanted to set it up somewhere dry, that would mean you'd have to walk half a mile out before you got to the sea, with the danger that then the tide would come in so fast it would sweep the thing away. Though of course it would sweep away the cigarette stubs, too.

In Pescara, halfway down Italy's fancy boot on the right-hand side, the sea scarcely moves at all on summer days. Or it's as if a broad dishful of water were tipped ever so gently this way and that. Tiny wavelets creep up the beach a meter or two, only to creep respectfully back, leaving the strollers and sunshades and pedal-boats untouched. The sand Michele is crunching in baby hands a hundred yards from the shore has the soft fineness of sand in an hourglass, dry as desert bone, certainly too dry to make a sandcastle with, but good for tossing up in the air, or pouring over Daddy's legs. Fortunately, there's not a breath of wind today to blow it into your eyes.

A couple more families saunter along the pathway from the road and the bathing-station bar down to their sunshades. The pathway is paved with small, square flagstones, because it is wearisome walking far across soft, dry sand, and then it would be difficult to push a buggy through it. The sunshades have small red discs with numbers to avoid confusion.