It’s days like today that I wish I could share Parma with you all. It can be lonely at times, even alienating, especially now that most of the Masters students have left for their internship adventures (including Rani)… but after a gelato of Bacio di Dama e Panna Cotta on the steps of the Duomo, I feel on top of the world.
I spent most of the day inside, finishing Slaughterhouse 5, and decided that after a few hours of Dresden fire-bombing, I deserved a break. So here I am, perched on the 600 year-old steps of the Duomo gazing up at the dwarfing clock tower, its uneven bricks peach-lit by the setting sun, but half a kilometre from my 500 year-old apartment building, doing what people do on Saturday afternoons in Parma: people-watching. It’s a pastime that never tires. I can’t get enough of the purple polo shirts, the upturned collars, the gaudy women made-up for pantomime – I will always be enthralled by the ‘as long as I look the part’ mentality. (If you need a visual, imagine a middle-aged Italian woman: now imagine that she has just died; and now, that she has been reincarnated. Into the same body. With the same face. Times by 20,000 and you have the streets of Parma by twilight. Ghoulish.) I see a woman from a distance who looks rather elegant: blonde hair, black stilettos, black skirt, pink poker-dot chemise, abbronzata… She comes right by me, a face like an absolute pug, the skirt barely concealing a number of rubber tyres not out of place on the hull of a PnO. I don’t object to the warts. We all have them. It’s the deception points.
But while I’m going to town on the women, really, I must be fair and talk about the men of my adopted city. May I speak of Wolverine in white chinos? I’m talking tufts of chest hair positively brimming from shirts, hair styles locked in eternal 70s flashbacks, Brylcreem churned to perfect viscosity and applied liberally to one giant Lothario bouffant that sweeps the city like a Roman wall. In the distance – the Gentlemen’s high-waisted-pants-brigade has left their tubas at home and donned their retiree-blazers to enjoy a tour of the Piazza, led by a small woman with a short brown bob: as I make notes from the steps, she is going ape-shit about the architectural features of the Baptistery. Are they listening or wondering which testicle will be first to recede?
But today didn’t belong to the groups of bizarre Parmagiani – it belonged to the abundance of babes teetering about the cobblestones in between stiletto towers. To my left is a serious looker in a micro-mini, a white cotton shirt and a pink jumper tied delicately around her shoulders, varsity-style. An ensemble plucked from Preppie Heaven. She’s can’t be older than two. I can see her at home, choosing the combinations herself, screeching as Mummy tries to pick something more demure (like knee-high boots). I watch her climb the steps with her stubby legs at least 30 times. I watch her weave in and out of bicycle traffic. I watch her almost get crushed by a bike. I watch her mother register mild concern, her eyes barely leaving their up-and-down obsession as the older female competitors swing by.
But really I’m getting sidetracked. Because what I want to say is how beautiful Parma can be – the sun sets stunning as the Summer yields to cooler seasons, the pastel buildings at their most romantic, the ambience eager to savour the last flavours of its own delight, and I’m beginning to feel a sense of pre-nostalgia – the feeling that I can’t quite get enough of this moment, that soon it will be gone and I’ll be gazing glassy-eyed wishing myself back to these steps with my gelato and my pastels and my clock tower, and as I do a part of me seeps out to take root, sinking down between the cracks to make a subterranean home for my wanting. And at the same time I have the sense that nostalgia is a feeling that must be shared, can’t be experienced alone – not fully anyway – and here I am, alone, with no one to share this moment with, with no one I know who can gaze back at this particular memory, instead just moments dissolving, setting like countless peach suns, and below me a well of emptiness opens because the people I know and love will never understand this place. Can’t.
How to assuage this feeling? I need to go past tedious comical portraits. I want to go beneath but I’m beginning to realise that it may not be possible for me. Not because I’m an outsider. But because whatever depth there is is not of interest. The lives are no less complex than yours, and yet, in a way, because living in the moment is second nature to Italians, I find it virtually impossible to delve into any hidden psychology, any real sense of continuity. The complexity of life here is the trickery of smoke and mirrors. Your attention is constantly diverted from seriousness: by fashion, by food, by football, by so many balding variety hosts and leggy attachés, so naturally what takes the ascendancy is pleasure – the Now. This is both wonderful and terrible. (I’m an optimist, but let’s start with terrible.) It’s disconcerting for those from cultures where in time, one can be sure to discover where the humanity of a society truly lies, where its people are engaged and what issues fire in the social engines. Parma has its pistons and its problems. I could tell you about the southern Mafiosi cooling their heels in two bedroom apartments blue-lit by daytime tv; the heroine addicts shooting up behind the Farnese palazzo; the horrific bike injuries and mangled bikes (of which I was a recent near-miss, an almost-statistic); the $2500 it costs to use gas and lights for six months; the African men selling fake Fendis on every corner who scamper when the Carabinieri come by; the stand-off outside the Casa della Musica between 30 socialists and three Nazis on May-Day; the front-page article about prostitutes soliciting around the corner from my apartment, near the European school where I pick up Giacomo every day – the feature photo honing in on two African women.
I’ve seen or heard all these things but I don’t know much more about them. And I wouldn’t even know whom to ask. They’re not part of any official history. Only background noise. Depths reduced to static, static upgraded to symphony. In the foreground are all the parts we like: prosciutto festivals, pretty girls and boys, window-shopping, cobblestones, old churches.
That's Parma, right?
