Читать книгу Roman Daze - Brontè Dee Jackson - Страница 14

Today is April 25, a big day for Italy. It is a holiday that celebrates the day Italy was liberated from German occupation during World War II, the day that was also the beginning of the end for the Italian Monarchy, and the day that was a precursor to Italy becoming a democratic, voting, independent republic. My husband explains all this to me on the way to our local bar to have our usual Saturday morning cappuccino and cornetto ( breakfast pastry) .

‘That is an important day,’ I remark. ‘No wonder it’s a holiday. All of that happened in one day?’ I ask, incredulous.

‘Well, maybe not all in one day,’ my husband says, ‘but it all started from La Liberazione.’ It seems they were liberated from more than just the Germans.

Today has the air of a special and sacred day. It is a day that honours Italian soldiers killed fighting for their country, it honours those who lost their lives resisting the German-supported Fascist State, and it honours the partisan, or people’s, movement which formed the basis of the movement to become a democratic republic. There are celebrations all over Italy; military parades and ceremonies to honour the living who participated in it and to remember their comrades who died for it.

There are old faces on the news. Old faces accepting with dignity the accolades due to them for activities long forgotten and unwitnessed. Faces that know they deserve this honour for the courage they had, the fear they had to overcome, the secret deeds they had to do. It is hard for me to imagine that kind of sacrifice.

There are other faces too. Faces that say ‘I am defeated’ and ‘I can’t stop remembering’. Faces that show that some fear, some pain, some memories never go away. Faces that say ‘I cannot forgive, I cannot forget, but I go on anyway’.

Most families have a story about wartime Italy; a loss, a death, a resister, a traitor, a collaborator, a soldier, some of which were women. These were the roles given to the Italian public to play. Everyone had one. My friend’s house, just outside of the main metropolis of Rome, was taken over and used as Nazi headquarters. My friend’s parents were part of the Italian Monarchy and lived in a huge villa set in extensive grounds. Their groundsman, who I later came to also be friends with, had a brother who was one of the thirty local men randomly selected one day by those Nazis and shot, in retaliation for three dead German soldiers found nearby. Ten Italians for every one German soldier. I drive past the memorial to these war crimes, built on the sight of the massacre, on a weekly basis.

This holiday to remember them all comes a week or so after Easter and a week before May 1 which is, of course, the famous ‘workers day’. No-one works on that day. I once tried to fly out of Italy on May 1. It is worse than Christmas Day because the ‘workers’ operate the trains, buses and taxis that get you to the airport, and they are all on holiday. There is no-one on the streets and nothing is open. These workers take their one day a year seriously. The Italian democratic republic State does too.

Not so with April 25. Although there are no shops open and the streets are quiet, you can still get a coffee until 1pm or go to the supermarket, as with most public holidays. Although, you have to be careful; my husband had gone yesterday to check that the supermarket would be open today and saw a sign which said it was open the usual hours. Today, it has changed its mind and is shutting in half an hour, half a day earlier than it said it would.

Except for the fact that I know Italians are brilliant astronomers and engineers, I would assume that they, as a culture, have a problem with numbers. They change depending on who they are being given to, where they are located and the level of convenience associated with them. For example, a set of favourable statistics being requested by the Pope at the Vatican would be easy to come by. However, some unpopular economic figures requested by a mayor’s assistant in a small province, that required work during a lunch hour to produce, probably wouldn’t be.

Birth dates are another example. When I first met my husband he told me his birthday was on December 29. So on December 29 I wished him a happy birthday and made a big fuss. I found it a bit strange that no-one else seemed to be doing so – no family members, no friends. Imagine my surprise when the next day his family and friends rang to wish him a happy birthday. Yes, he explained to me, he was born on December 29 but his birthday is celebrated the day after because that is the date written on his birth certificate.

‘But why does your birth certificate say you are born the day after you were actually born?’ I had asked. ‘Is it tradition to add on a day?’

‘No, it is because the doctor signed it on the day he received the birth certificate,’ my husband said. I was outraged.

‘Apart from the obvious astrological ramifications,’ I explained to my husband, ‘the whole point of a birth certificate is to certify that you were born and on what day. Not the day it was convenient for the doctor to sign it.’

‘Well, it’s better than my niece,’ he replied. ‘She was born on August 31 but her declared date of birth is September 3.’

August being traditionally the month that everyone goes on holiday, there were no doctors around to sign the birth certificate, so it was signed when they got back from holidays. Whenever I start this conversation among Italians, there is always someone whose date of birth had to be changed for the sake and convenience of bureaucracy. Some people have up to one week’s difference.

So who makes them celebrate the date they are declared to be born and not the actual date? The State does. The Monarchy is dead and in its place is the mighty Italian State. While we are sipping our morning cappuccini on the Day of Liberation, enjoying the quiet tranquillity of the holiday, I realise that liberation from one form of social control does not mean there won’t be any in its place. It is a matter of having the choice, I suppose, and being able to choose the one that makes you feel safer and the one that you feel is the fairest. When your king runs off as the invading armies enter your country, after enjoying the fruits of Monarchy all his life, it would be galling. I can see how painful it must have been for Italians to experience that. I can see how that would lead to a fierce desire for self-determination and the realisation that the people could probably run the country just as well.

Italy as a nation had not long been in existence before World War II. It was only in the mid-1860s that all the principalities and kingdoms that make up the current landmass of Italy were conquered and forced to become one nation under one king. Before that, there were several kings and local princes that ran each part of it – there was the Kingdom of Naples, the Principality of Florence, the Kingdom of Sardenia, the Principality of Venice, and so on.

It explains why Italy doesn’t feel like one country. The language, food, how people look and behave, and the types of housing differ significantly from one part of Italy to another. It is only just under 150 years that they have been referring to themselves as one country. It also explains the fierce identity that most Italians have with their place of birth. If they move locations they are still known as ‘the one from Abruzzo’, ‘the Southerner’ or ‘the Venetian’, even twenty years after they have been living in the new place.

There is also a wariness between northern and southern Italians, that at best borders on suspicion and at worst explodes as judgemental disdain. A few years ago a major political party ran on a campaign for the north to secede from the south. They got enough votes to be part of the government for many years. I once saw graffiti in Venice written in huge letters which ran the length of a wall that said ‘Southerners go home’. The word used for Southerners, however, was a derogative phrase, the equivalent of the Western word ‘nigger’.

After a concert one evening in Bologna in the north, friends of ours from the south were in the queue to get out of the car park. A woman backed her car out in front of them, only just missing them.

‘Watch where you are going, lady!’ my friend yelled out.

‘Oh shut up you Southern immigrant, what would you know?’ she replied, discerning his southern roots from his accent.

My friend, who is a large man from the south and a criminal court judge, was for the only time in his life short for words.

‘Come here and I’ll show you what a southern boy knows,’ he eventually managed to squeak out, on the road one hour out of Bologna.

The Southerners get their own back, though, by instinctively knowing that they have the better deal when it comes to day-to-day living in Italy. They have all the best beaches and the sunshine, which, along with the chronic unemployment, provokes a happy-go-lucky way of life that is much better for the soul. They have generous, forgiving hearts, these Southerners.

Romans, I must add at this point, are a race unto themselves. They don’t fit into the north/south divide because they are simply Roman. They have been there far longer than Italy itself, and in fact far longer than any other Italians. Italy grew up around them and they never let anyone forget that. They have nothing to prove, nothing to hide; they just are, and they are unapologetic about it.

When I first went to Bologna for a four-day weekend, I felt that something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it. By late Saturday afternoon I realised what it was. It was quiet. In the middle of a major city, it was quiet.

It wasn’t just the smaller population, it was the way they behaved. I couldn’t hear anyone’s conversation. When they spoke into their mobile phones on the street they were not speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, as a typical Roman would be. There was no mad gesticulating as the speaker tried to stop the other party thanking or congratulating them, or asking them for advice. There was no way of overhearing what that person was going to have for dinner or at what time they would be arriving somewhere and why.

And the traffic. It was circumspect and what I would call rational. That is, it went from A to B without any flourishes of Formula One-type demonstrations, no knee-touching-the-road turns by the motorini drivers and no horns!

‘Why is Bologna so different?’ I wondered out loud to my husband. ‘Why in Rome do people have the need to announce with symbols and loud sounds that they are there?’

‘Because they are Romans,’ my husband muttered, ‘because they are Romans.’

The Italians chose self-determination, a republic, and from that the mighty Italian State grew. And grew. And grew. And to run such a diverse State you needs rules, laws, documents, processes and people to check all these.

In Italy, bureaucracy reigns. Identity Cards, registering where you live with the local police station, signing up at the local council so you can be assigned a doctor, all these are requirements and seen as common sense by the average Italian. Most Italians are incredulous when I tell them that when I move house back home I don’t have to inform my government. Or that I can freely nip to the local bar for a coffee without carrying anything that would identify me and where I live.

Nothing in Italy can be done without a plethora of identity documents, which start at birth. Every Italian carries around with them an Identity Card with photo, a fiscal code card, a health card and a licence if they drive, as a minimum. Legally you can be stopped and asked for these by a dizzying array of police – financial police, army police, traffic police, local police – or public transport ticket inspectors who can fine or detain you if you don’t have them on you in the original form. And from infancy onwards your date of birth is that which is shown on your official document. You have to repeat it aloud, write it and show it a zillion times; your schooling is based around it, your pension calculated according to it, your medical records reflect it. In the end, you just give up and celebrate this official birth date when the bureaucratic machine that is the State of Italy tells you to celebrate it.

This is why my husband now has a two-day birthday that starts on December 29 and goes until December 30. The person who has a week between their two dates is also very keen on this idea, they tell me.

The other numbers that change due to convenience or, in this case, cultural tradition, are house numbers. When my husband and I rented apartment number 17 at number 20 Pennabilli Street, we were perplexed the first time we checked the letterboxes. All of our mail came with the number 17 crossed out and the number 16b written in pencil next to it. We checked the number outside our front door and the number on our lease; they both said we had rented apartment number 17. However, our letterbox said 16b, and underneath was written the number 17.

I was anxious to get this number correct, as we had given our new address to family and friends, and it was also the address for my business. Finally, we asked our neighbour. The answer, it seems, is based on the fact that the number 17 is an unlucky number for Romans. In order to avoid coming across it and having to associate with it daily, the postman and the administrator of our apartment block – the Italian State at work again; all apartment blocks must be administrated – changed the number of our apartment at the most local decision-making level. It seems they did not need to inform us.

Numbers can also change depending on the consequences of having those particular numbers. A friend of mine was applying for one of the many documents that you must have if you are a foreigner and intend to live in Italy. As per usual, one document lead to another. In order to have this particular document she needed to demonstrate that the bill for the emptying of rubbish by council rubbish trucks was in her name. In order to have the bill for the rubbish in her name she had to register herself at the local office for rubbish removal. It was explained to her that the bill would be calculated based on the size of her apartment and she was asked how many square metres it was. When she replied, the official was amazed; it seemed her apartment was rather large compared to all others in the vicinity, including those in the same building. He asked her several times if she was really, really sure that her apartment was that size.

In Rome it is quite easy to know how many square metres your apartment is, as they are bought, sold, rented and leased based on this number, which appears in the documentation. So my friend was quite sure how many square metres her apartment was.

Her annual bill was then calculated based on these measurements. My friend’s face fell. It was a huge sum of money for her. The official quietly asked whether she now thought her apartment was not quite as large as she had first imagined.

‘Yes,’ she humbly replied, ‘yes, I think you are right, it isn’t quite as big as I had first thought.’ He responded by slowly scrunching up the previous documentation and taking out a fresh sheet of paper to begin the calculation again.

Lastly, numbers can change without any explanation at all. And then change back again. When I first moved to Rome in the mid-1990s, I lived in a condemned apartment block that has since fallen down. My flatmate and I would wait until the very last moment to pay our phone bill. We were both struggling backpackers trying to eke out a living, and times were often desperate. There was only one phone company in Italy, no phone cards, no mobile phones, no competition and we were often homesick for family and friends. It cost $3 per minute to phone Australia back then. The telephone company would send the bill and then it was about three months before they cut off your ability to make calls if you didn’t pay. But you could still receive calls for another two months before they would cut you off completely. That always gave us around five months to pay the bill. At the end of three months we would inform our friends that they would have to call us as we could no longer call out. Most people were in the same situation so it was taken for granted that we would all have to do this for each other at different times.

Once we were sure we had used all the time possible and had scraped together enough money to pay, one of us would go down to the main office in Trastevere. Our phone would be working again within twenty-four hours. This system worked well for several years.

One time, however, something went horribly wrong. We had paid our bill and could call out again, so joyously announced this to all our friends. Then we noticed that we weren’t getting our usual quota of calls back. We got the occasional person telling us that they had tried but there was no answer. Then we started getting the occasional person telling us that a guy named Marco answered every time they called our number. Then we started getting Marco’s friends calling us. We called the telephone company on numerous occasions, telling them that somehow the phone lines had been crossed because our number no longer led to our telephone. They kept telling us we were mistaken.

At one stage, I tried yelling and screaming at the top of my lungs at the main office. I was led quietly and firmly up to the Head Office, where a very nice woman showed me on her computer screen that our number was linked to our phone.

‘I don’t care what your computer says,’ I told her, ‘it is wrong. When we dial our number it goes to someone else’s house and when they dial their number it goes to our house.’

‘There is nothing we can do,’ she said, ‘the computer says it’s all okay.’ According to the Italian State telephone company there was no problem, so there wasn’t.

Frustrated beyond belief and realising there was nothing we could do, my flatmate and I manned our phone day and night. The next time we had a call for Marco, we explained our situation. We asked what number they had been calling and then gave them our number as the new number on which they could get Marco. We then told our friends and family our ‘new’ number and got on with life. We continued using our phone as always and were heading towards the usual enormous bill of over $1,500, when one day a sheepish telephone company man knocked on our door. He had come to ‘adjust’ our phone. Nothing unusual, just routine, but he couldn’t quite explain what it was, just an adjustment.

The next day our original number was back, no explanation, no apology, no acknowledgement, but also no bill. Their computer had no way of tracing our bill. Our number was registered against this phone as not having been used because their computer said so.

The same Italian telephone company now has competition, lots of it. I was one of the first people in Italy to take advantage of that. They ring regularly, trying to get my custom back and offering me all kinds of deals. When they ask why I won’t sign up with them, I tell them the above story. There is usually a short silence and then they hang up.

In spite of all this chopping and changing that occurs within Italy regarding numbers, facts and allegiances, I am in awe of this Day of Liberation as I sit in my usual bar sipping on my second morning cappuccino. It feels strange to be in a country that was once occupied and is now celebrating its liberation from that occupation, because I see Italy as the country from which high fashion, divine food, exquisite glassware and furniture come. It is a nation that houses some of the world’s greatest art, buildings and Roman ruins, so I sometimes forget that it suffered the ultimate humiliation a nation can suffer, that of being taken over by an enemy. Of seeing them drive down the main streets, circling the Coliseum with their tanks, triumphant in their victory. Of having their beloved buildings and masterpieces adorned with another nation’s flag, within living memory of many of the people I am sipping my cappuccino with.

All around me are people who can sit and enjoy this day of celebration and appreciate what it means to have your country back. They are people who can revel in the relief and reward of overcoming such a humiliation, and have a sacrifice mean something, even sixty-five years later. I understand that, after that kind of experience, getting a few numbers mixed up every now and then is really nothing to cry about.