Italian life is very Soviet. People imagine us meandering into little sun-dappled offices where a handsome doctor is tending his lemon trees. He smiles warmly at a young patient and pinches their cheek fondly.
Yet Italy is all about bureaucracy.
Everything has to be signed in triplicate. Here, if you apply for a mortgage, your hand really starts to ache. Anyway, I wanted to get my son vaccinated against swine flu because he has asthma. So, abandoning work on a psychoanalytic essay that I might get published, we went to the health centre where hundreds of elderly people were milling about vigorously. After two hours it emerged that he was eligible for a vaccine only with a stamped doctor’s letter. The doctor (after a long wait) rolled his eyes and said: “Italian bureaucracy!”
Once, when my son was in hospital with salmonella poisoning, I got so bored with the bureaucratic quagmire of being discharged that I did a runner, drip-feed hanging from Lev’s arm. The police scoured the local town and I eventually gave myself up. All they needed was a signature that confirmed they had found me. Then: “Buona serata, signora!” So, there we were, queueing with all of the pregnant and elderly of the region and I was on the phone to my husband discussing my essay (a textbook error).
“It might get published,” I said. The old people were complaining about how long it was all taking, waving their arms and shouting, apparently joyfully. I was not enjoying it at all. For one thing, the Shetland pony that I accidentally agreed to adopt was arriving in 20 minutes at our house up the now very cold mountain.
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For another, the cacophonous waiting room whingeing was fuzzing my phone call.
“You have now contributed to the sum of human endeavour,” my husband said.
“You what?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “the essay will be . . . out there!”
At this point, a hassled-looking nurse appeared from a gloomy corridor and the room fell silent. “No vaccine for the over- 75s,” she shouted. Within moments, the children and I were alone with a pregnant woman and an elderly resident who insisted that she was only 73. This was patently untrue (she was easily 80), but she had probably been lying since her 40th birthday and wasn’t going to stop now. I carried on shouting into my mobile. (This is fairly obligatory here.) “Yeah . . . but . . . I suppose I’ve put a lot of stuff ‘out there’,” I said. Seven novels, a memoir, a lot of journalism . . .
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“Sure,” husband agreed. “But that’s all out there like . . . well . . . like the plans for a sewage works.”
Luckily, I had to hang up because it was our turn. I signed in sextuplet, discussed the weather and the pony, and Lev got jabbed in the arm. “Now wait here for 20 minutes,” the nurse told us. Yeah, right.
Driving home with a boot full of hay, various funny-named brushes and forky things, I digested the conversation I’d just had, the gist being that everything I’ve done is sewage. Not even sewage! Plans for the disposal of faecal matter.
Cara May clopped out of her box and into our garden. The shovel, wheelbarrow and rake that constitute the literal faeces-disposal system were ready and waiting, and we were just trying to work out which brush was for what when the health centre phoned to say that we had broken the law by not waiting 20 minutes and I would have to come back to sign something.