The Dark Heart of Italy (40 page)

There are many things which are striking about the story, not least the fact that it emerged in exactly the same way as the Moggi one. Long before any trial, transcripts are made public. Character assassination and defence takes place in the press and, predominantly, on television. Outrage at the vulgarity and corruption is quickly replaced by unease about the eavesdrop-and-leak methodology. The right leaps to defend the National Alliance politician-cum-connoisseur and conveniently finds another reason to criticise Rai. Everyone is announced innocent until proven guilty and, since that will take 10 or 15 years, it’s quickly forgotten about. I’m currently being sued for defamation by one of the Piazza Fontana bombers who was acquitted on appeal, so I’m cautious about writing about trials even after a sentence, let alone before. What Vittorio Emanuele and Sottile said is so allusive that probably nothing will hold up in court. The alleged bribe to the
Monopolio di Stato
for the fruit machine concession may be only an empty allegation. But I begin to sympathise with the magistrates who release these conversations and the journalists who publish them. When there’s no justice there’s not much point, as far as I can see, worrying about sub judice. Investigators, for example, sent transcripts of Moggi’s conversations to the Italian FA in February. Amazingly, they did nothing. They ignored the implications and took no action other than, presumably, hurriedly preparing their own defence. Unfortunately trial by media, and therefore trial by public opinion, really does seem the only solution. There’s nothing illegal about Vespa asking a politician who he may bring into his own studio, but at least we now have confirmation of quite how craven he really is.

The ‘Velinagate’ (
veline
are the TV girls in bikinis) scandal intrigued me because it revealed that there really was a precise connection between political power and abysmal television. These young girls are like the small-change which gamblers throw around to keep everyone happy. They’re shunted from one man to the next. Not only does a politician’s power allow him to influence the newsreaders; it also allows him to audition the bodies which go into the studio. Once the high-faluting pomp of public
Italian is gone and deals are being done in private, there’s not much left to the imagination. One woman, not a show-girl but a one-time incumbent of a breakfast show sofa, was recorded as she called Sottile to flirt and seek assistance. She calls herself a
cavaletta
– a grasshopper. The choice of description implies an animal which had leapt on to his lap and was after something (the word
cavaletta
hints at avidity). That someone I had always imagined to be closer to the decent, cerebral end of the TV spectrum was being a coquettish grasshopper with the spokesman of the leader of a post-fascist political party told me everything I needed to know about the carnal link between television and politics. As one of the
veline
admitted, either one has to be very lucky or else one has to
scendere a patti
, get down to pacts. Some go low, some go high: one former show-girl, Mara Carfagna, is now a member of parliament and sits alongside the other colourful characters of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia benches.

I’m not being puritanical. I’ve nothing against a woman whose career thus far has been topless pics and erotic dancing becoming a legislator. What really, really pisses me off is the fact that talented people in Italy very rarely rise to the top. The notion of a meritocracy is incomprehensible to those who enjoy being powerful patrons. Every week I’m assailed by a new example of nepotism. My favourite is the fact that, at Rai, employment can literally be inherited. There’s a convention at the state broadcaster that full-time employees can renounce a part of their company pension in return for their offspring being allowed to enter the company. Many proud, generous parents take up the offer. Thus when you arrive for an interview in a local studio you may find that the man miking you up was, until yesterday, a baker from Locri. Now, I’ve nothing against the man from Locri, but you can understand the consequences.

For years I had been fascinated with how the reality of Italian life appears lifted from a thriller. Life often does, as Sciascia said about the Moro kidnap, appear like a macabre script. The evening news is always dominated by a new
giallo
– a thriller – and you have to watch every night to get the latest instalments and twists.
But once I had finished this book I gradually, partly through exhaustion, became less interested in following those
gialli
and was alerted to something else: the actual fiction, the truly made-up and invented thrillers. Because if you spend a lot of time in Italian bookshops you quickly realise one thing: Italian noir is both stunningly successful and also stunningly good. It’s partly because writers like Massimo Carlotto, Carlo Lucarelli, Marcello Fois and Andrea Camilleri are setting novels in the best backdrop in the world, a place where good and evil are taken to extremes. Even non-Italian writers - Patricia Highsmith, Michael Dibdin or Donna Leon – go there for the scenery and skulduggery. The Italian thriller-writer is fortunate that the reader doesn’t need to suspend disbelief. So many astonishing and intricate crimes seem to take place in the country that the fictional ones appear perfectly probable. In Carlotto’s case, the real-life and invented noir coexist: in the 1970s he was a member of Sofri’s Lotta Continua. (Sofri, by the way, is still officially in prison though frequently released on health grounds.) Accused of murdering a young girl, Carlotto fled to Paris and then Mexico, only to be extradited years later. He always pleaded innocence and, since a pardon by the President of the Republic, has written decidedly hard-boiled books. But there’s more to the success of Italian noir than simply the setting. When you read these prismatic novels you find them satisfying because they’re not only concerned to find the killer, but to analyse themes of truth and the skiddiness of reality. Invariably, the Italian thriller begins with the case already resolved. We know all about the crime and the culprit, only that the culprit pleads innocence. That’s the case in Marcello Fois’s
The Advocate
or Massimo Carlotto’s
The Colombian Mule
.

Most Anglo-Saxon detective fiction is concerned with justice: the Italian version tends, more interestingly, to focus on injustice. Reflecting the reality of the setting, Italian noir offers no neat resolutions. Hercule Poirot moments, when the entire cast is assembled and the detective delivers a tidy summary, are rare. In Italian whodunits one may discover who did it, but – a reflection of what happens in the real world – the criminal is rarely collared; the writer
gives you the satisfaction of solving the crime, but withholds the pleasure of letting you see justice done. ‘Italy’, writes Carlotto, ‘has lost any sense of where truth lies’.
2
‘No one cared about knowing the truth’, says the narrator of Marcello Fois’s
The Advocate
.
3
It sounds cynical, which it is. But it means that the Italian brand of noir dances on that subtle boundary between just suspicion and insane paranoia, and the reader senses what Pirandello called the ‘marvellous torment’ of ambiguity: ‘I find you all exhausted from your search to find out who and what other people are’.
4

The chasm that often exists in Italy between appearance and reality is what makes life, as much as literature, intriguing. Learning Italian can be hard because there’s so much flamboyance and rhetoric in the language that words, as one English friend once observed, have colours and sounds rather than actual meanings. Sentences search for brilliant effect more through musicality – the rhythm and tone and pitch – than through actual sense. The blunt expedient of communication, guaranteed through brutish straight-talking, is secondary to the beauty of the sound. That’s why it’s often almost impossible to render in English a passage of Italian: you have to search for a meaning which often isn’t even there. There are many trying moments, but there are always amusing sides to the anglo-Italian encounter. Our daughter is growing up hearing and speaking both languages. In Bristol, a few weeks ago, she was impatient to get to the swings and turned around to us two and shouted, in Italian, ‘come on’. Every few metres she would turn around and scream the same word – the trouble being that the Italian for ‘come on’ is
dai
, pronounced like an enthusiastic ‘die’. The English-speakers in the playground were clearly rattled by this gentle-looking child with her curly blonde hair apparently wishing death on her parents: ‘Dai mamma! Daddy dai!’

There have, unfortunately, been bereavements as well as births since the publication of this book. I originally wrote a closing chapter on ‘I Morti’ because I instinctively felt that there was something different about mourning and bereavement in Italy. That feeling has now been confirmed by first-hand experience. It
may appear a small thing, but when my father-in-law died, the boss of the company where he had worked for over 40 years sent his personal chauffeur 300 kilometres to pick up my wife and drive her home. Even if (as is now highly unlikely) someone in Britain had worked for the same company for that long, it’s improbable that the boss would make such a gesture. It revealed a positive side of a very patrician society. Previously, I had only ever seen that aspect of Italy as negative: powerful men dispense favours and threats from on high and us plebs have to put up with it. Unexpectedly, I realised that there was a noble side to that patriciate. The rigidity and formality of society, which at first I had found claustrophobic and old-fashioned, was slowly revealed as one of the beguiling ingredients of Italy. I began to like the fact that when I dropped off my dry-cleaning I had to use not my surname, not even my wife’s, but the surname of my wife’s maternal grandfather. The family had been going there for generations and were still known by the name Calebich. Dropping off clothes with that name would guarantee a certain affection and friendliness so why use what, for them, is an unspellable Welsh surname instead? At first Italy had appeared to be very gerontocratic, run by and for old men. Slowly, I began to appreciate that Italy’s immovable traditionalism wasn’t a slavish attachment to the past but rather a way to cherish ancestors and maintain their memory.

And it’s only, perhaps, when you’ve been away that you realise the true value of the place. I had been absent from Parma for a long time writing another book, but on returning I was astonished at the intimacy and warmth of it. Whilst various sordid scandals make the news, the charm of street-level humanity goes unreported: everyone at the station is good-humoured, people are laughing. You step across the road and lean over the low wall to look for the river, called the
torrente
. It’s almost completely dry. Trees are sprouting in the parched river bank where, only a month before, water had surged with huge trunks of driftwood washed down from the mountains to the south of the city. Hidden for much of the year by fog and clouds, you can see them now, the majestic mountains against a deep blue sky. The frogs are begin
ning their deafening chorus on the riverbanks, billowing their throats in search of a mate. There are boxes of petunias all across the bridge. It’s the
passeggiata
hour, that blissful, pre-dusk period in which the whole city goes for a walk. People are calmly strolling up and down the same streets: lovers on the paths above the
cittadella
, the adolescents in Via Cavour, retired couples walking arm in arm along the wide pavement which lines the river. Children are walking with their grandparents, as they do every evening.

You walk into the Parco Ducale. It’s got glistening white gravel. At this time, the statues are all in the shade, but you can still see where the sun kisses the plaster through the leaves of the trees. There’s the old Palazzo Ducale with its fox-hunting prints. You went round it years ago, disturbing the kind
carabiniere
who was asleep at the reception desk of the station. As you walk towards home, you bump into the butcher. Big Vanni, hands like spades. All smiles. An old student is there pushing a pram, and you stop and chat, admiring the child and asking why she never did go to London the way she longed to. There will be that girl, the one you fancied with the freckly nose, walking across the grass with her shoes in her hands and you wave at her.

The shop windows on the way are unbelievable. It’s worth stopping not to admire the products but simply their placement. The record store has loads of posters, but Luca has hung plastic ice-cube containers from the ceiling. They’re filled with blue foam. No idea why, and the shop’s closed by now so you can’t go in and ask him. But the placement is perfect. Visual brilliance: it just makes you want to go in, which is precisely the aim. Then the furniture shop. Then the carpenter’s next door. The picture-framers, the cobbler. All those artisan boutiques: an incredible cross-over between high-fashion and honest trade.

You go into a grocer’s and there’s a long queue. But everyone is talking to everyone else, happy to wait their turn. One woman starts describing to you how to illuminate your driveway by finding hollow snails’ shells. You apparently have to fill them with oil and sand, and place them at metre intervals all the way to your
front door. ‘You light them and they make the drive look like an incredibly elegant runway’, she laughs. When it’s your turn, the shop-keeper notices what you’re buying and offers you advice on the preparation of the meal. The advice lasts a few minutes but no-one is impatient. Others chip in with their own observations. You realise with embarrassment that you haven’t got enough cash, but she laughs and tells you to drop by another time. ‘There’s no hurry’, she says.

You catch the bus. You stand by the driver and end up talking about football. Since the thing is empty of passengers, he doesn’t follow the bus route but, squeezing the bus through narrow backstreets like a cork through a keyhole, drops you at your door. ‘Ci
vediamo
’ he says cheerfully. ‘See you around’.

There, just below your house, is the photographer standing outside his little studio. He complains to you about the heat, and you tease him, saying the
parmigiani
talk about the weather all the time. It’s always either too hot, too cold, too humid. ‘You talk about the weather more than the English!’ You and the photographer both sit down on the pavement, in the shade of his shop awning. The barman next door brings out a couple of glasses of squeezed grapefruit. You talk for twenty minutes.