My Pranzo with Vincenzo

He approached my table to borrow a chair, explaining that his two wives would be joining him as soon as the train arrived from Rome. He lived in Spoleto now, with his nurse, because it was easier for him in Spoleto where people could come take care of him and he could paint all day—he was a painter, had in fact done all the paintings in the restaurant, watercolors of fruits and vegetables. He had a sack—you know, what they give you when they cut out your intestines. He patted it gently. Diverticulitis, he explained. In Spoleto the nurse comes and takes care of him and someone else comes to cut his toe-nails and his wife stays in Rome with her mother who is missing a leg. If he ever needs her, though, she hops on the train and gets here in a flash. He can call at two in the morning—anytime, and she will come. She and the nurse (wasn’t really his second wife, but he liked to pretend) would be here any minute to join him for pranzo. That’s why he needed the other chair—so he’d have two free and another on which to put his folded up overcoat and red scarf and hat.

He was a dapper fellow in a baby blue cashmere V-neck and bow-tie, white haired, eyes as blue and soft as the sweater; he smelled like baby-powder. He asked me if I was Dutch or German and when I told him I was American he said he’d been to every country in the world at one time or another except the United States because he had been sure it held no surprises. India, China, Peru were interesting because so different; to see America all he had to do was turn on the TV. He showed me he knew how to speak English by uttering phrases he remembered from a textbook: “How are you today? Would you like some tea?” He giggled at himself and asked me how I’d come to know Italian. I told him about my life and job and interests.

He told me that when he was in the hospital getting his intestines cut out, they had given him more than the usual dose of morphine. They had promised him, while giving the morphine, that there is one thing in life one can never lose, even under the influence of morphine: and that’s intelligence and culture. You can lose your mother, lose your wife, lose all your relatives, lose your legs, lose everything, but even in a concentration camp they can’t take away your intelligence and culture. His father had been in a concentration camp for two years. They’d all been fascists till they caught on to what fascism was. A pack of lies is what Mussolini had told them. Everyone was fascist until they caught on. Spoletini are still fascists—I had to watch out for them. But even his father had said what the nurse had told him: you can never lose intelligence or culture.

He’d met a woman in the hospital who had lost one leg to diabetes and had just learned that she would have to have the other leg amputated. She told the doctor she would rather die than have her grandchildren see her with no legs. She was adamant: no way would she endure the operation. “Do you really think your grandchildren would rather lose you altogether than see you without legs?” the man told me he’d asked the unfortunate woman. “I said this because it came in mind for me to say it. It just came out of my mouth.” Then he’d heard much later from the doctor that those words had changed the woman’s life. She’d had the operation and was doing fine and had even told the doctor to thank the man, Vincenzo, who had calmed her down that day.

This is the beauty of life. You do something so small and it turns out to be so big. These are le belle cose…the beautiful things of life.

I finished my zuppa di farro about the time two young-looking women arrived, taking the chairs on either side of Vincenzo. They both looked like ageing fashion-models, in elegant wools and boots. “My two wives,” Vincenzo grinned at me and then told his wives he’d like to introduce them to his American lover. As I was leaving the restaurant I could hear him telling them stories about me, stories I hadn’t remembered even sharing with him that were nonetheless true.