I have come back to Florence for a month, from Chicago, and my son is going to a nursery school run by some of the local nuns. After a few days he comes home able to intone, with the utmost seriousness, "Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio, dello Spirito Santo, Amen," and to join his hands in pious prayer. Catching him at it in front of a painting of Christ in a church, someone tells me that with his beautiful curls, he is just like an angel of Raphael. I dilate with motherly pride, delighted to be back in a country where people are so attached to children.
Italians do indeed pay special attention to children, especially little ones, and will give their cheeks a friendly squeeze between the sides of two fingers when they meet small children in the street, the men often squatting down to be on their level and to be able to talk to them face to face, person to person. But this sentiment co-exists with a ruthless realism about the business of bringing up children and, contrary to what the casual observer might think, this realism is the ruling passion here.
A few days after my arrival I am sitting under the beehive in my local hairdresser when someone says, "Stay-la, ben tornata"-welcome back! I'm nonplussed, unable to place her. "I'm Sandra, from the bread shop," she says. The bread shop is one of the commercial hubs of the neighbourhood. Run by several members of the same family, it sells about 20 different kinds of bread from rows of wicker baskets tilted invitingly towards the customers, together with biscuits, basic desserts, and offcuts of great sheets of schiacciata, warm bread covered with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, which is given to children. While the mother of the family toils (with several employees) in the molten depths, her son and two daughters preside out front. The women are turned out in hats and white overalls, crisply ironed and bordered in pink. They are always extravagantly made up, their lips lined with purple crayon and filled in with the densest scarlet. Their lashes flash blue or violet, and they are particularly solicitous of male shoppers.
I peer out from under the hot dryer and see that it is indeed Sandra, but a Sandra denuded of make-up, and a Sandra whose locks, formerly piled high under her cap, and often with a streak or two of red hair mascara, are now ragged and shoulder length. I must have looked aghast, because she rushes to explain herself. The thing is, she says, she had a baby a few months ago, and it's been terrible. He doesn't sleep, he won't eat properly. She's got to find a nursery for him so she can go back to work, and it's very expensive. It's all a nightmare and she wished she had never done it, lost her liberty and all for what? Perhaps the next time will be easier, I say, slightly shocked but still feeling the effect of the Raphael compliment. "Next time! You must be joking," she says. She's never going to do it again. What for? To double the trouble. Un bambino, e basta!-one's enough.
A few days later Leo Blair is born, which prompts me to reflect on the different attitudes now prevailing in Britain and Italy towards the baby business. While in Britain (I think jealously) the middle classes are indulging in a prolonged bout of competitive parturition, in Italy the birth rate is low across the board, though with small bulges at either end of the economic scale. One-child families are now both social norm and cultural trope; a single, smiling child appears with its prosperous, modern, beautiful (but definitely not young) parents in advertisements everywhere. Two children are fine, of course, but more tend to indicate a failure either of contraception or virility. "Il terzo è sempre un errore," someone once said to me-the third is always a mistake; if not, it is produced by couples who have only managed to have girls, something which still provokes a fair amount of scorn and pity.
People are not slow to put the smallness of families into a political context. "Of course children are a pleasure," says an elderly lady to me in the park at the end of my street, as we sit in the shade of a tree and watch them careering about, "but only if you can afford to pay for them." "That's right," another chimes in, "a pleasure for the rich who have everything well arranged. But my son can't start a family when he hasn't got a job." In Britain, Thatcherite values have been so thoroughly internalised that the view that if you want something-in this case a large family-then you have to create the conditions for its existence yourself is more and more unquestionably accepted. In Italy, remarkably (given a political situation which is both chaotic and frequently paralysed) people have not stopped seeing their own daily lives in political terms. A robust and direct class antagonism persists.
It is easy to fall into the Forsterian error that the Italians are a spontaneous and passionate people. Sex, yes; but don't slip up like Tony and Cherie unless you are rich enough not to be a drain on your family. And don't think that a large family will receive a welcome of unalloyed joy. Walking down the street with an Anglo-Italian friend and with four children between us, I heard a woman say to her companion, "Look at those foreigners. They come to this country, have all those children, and use up our resources." Chauvinistic, yes; but fair enough, too, for we had indeed been chatting self-satisfiedly a moment before about the marvel of the free state nursery schools which all children here can attend from the age of three.
