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.

Pizza Night Puzzlements

We are gathered at Sacrestia to re-establish our Saturday night rite: Pizza Night with Bente and Merisa. For a time we went to another a pizzeria because Daniela wanted to support the young family who had opened it, especially after a group of my students nearly burned down their Monteluco hotel while building a bonfire in their fireplace. Then Bente had been diagnosed with liver cancer and had spent most of the winter in the hospital and the summer and fall adjusting to a specialized diet the doctors had prescribed and subsequent months adjusting to the impact of chemo on her appetite. It really is the first time the four of us have celebrated Pizza Night together in a year. Bente has lost 16 kilos she never had to lose and looks gaunt in her gabardine suit with a spilla—lapel pin—shaped like a leaf or a feather of tiny pearls. Merisa remarks how much she likes the pin and Daniela remarks she has one just like it that her mother had bought her in Spain when they’d traveled there, just the two of them, when Daniela was a girl. Bente remarks that she likewise bought her pin in Spain but was already married and so not a girl—but it could have been at the same time Daniela had gotten hers, given Bente is so much older. I tell them both I’ve decided it is a feather—because the fronds of pearls are so delicate.

The boy named Matteo who knows I eat only the Mezzanotte—arugula, tomato and smoked provola cheese--says outright that he will make it a quarter of the normal size out of respect for my diet. He likewise knows also what each of my friends will order, even after a year, and it amazes us all that he remembers and, not only that he remembers, but that we are all so predictable without knowing how predictable we are…or was it the power of suggestion, his telling us what we liked and reminding us how good it was the last time we were here, so that the idea of choice and full menus of choices, eludes us or seems to interfere with the more crucial things we have to talk about.

Tonight the gossip concerns a woman in town who was once engaged to a twin. For years the woman was the lover of this man we will call Federico. Then they’d had the kind of lover’s spat that lovers tend to have and she’d gone along mourning him for maybe a year until they’d suddenly encountered each other per strada not too long ago—must have been six or seven months ago, given the size of her pregnant belly. The thing was: It was not Federico she’d encountered and gone to bed with, but the twin, Franco…and after one night of love making she’d conceived a baby without knowing that the baby was the baby of a stranger. The deceit had so enraged the woman that she’d sought DNA testing and taken the imposter to court to sue for moral damages. She had learned that identical twins have the exact same DNA so that it was impossible to prove which twin had fathered the baby, but she’d nevertheless won the law suit—50, 000 euro in “moral damages” plus eighteen years of child support for the offspring of that one night of dark pleasure.

I think it’s hilarious, Daniela hoots—perfect justice. She could have taken the pill or, better yet, practiced abstinence. “Pensa!” Merisa says, astonished, as this is the first she’s heard the story and was widowed recently after having been married to only one man for fifty years. Bente is the one who loves to chatter and has recounted the details of this tryst, both for its surprise value and the mystery—just imagine, she turns to Merisa—if Maurizio had had a twin and you’d made love to his double! Merisa turns a little pale at the thought and then blushes.

I don’t buy it, I interrupt—I’m sorry. I don’t believe she could not tell the difference. Even if the two men had the exact same body (the one twin was shorter, Bente interjects) their maniera would be different, especially in bed. Tell me you wouldn’t know the touch of your lover from that of a stranger! I just don’t buy it!

Certo, certo, any woman would recognize her lover’s touch, Daniela proclaims as though she and I had reversed the court’s verdict and could now set right all the world’s injustices. “Vero, Merisa? Vero, Bente?” You would think I were the oracle given the queasy way the two older women look at me, perhaps assuming I've known too many lovers if I have figured this out. Daniela alone is delighted that we have stumbled upon such clear and irrefutable evidence.

Matteo with his sweet always-sleepy looking face and murmur-y way of addressing us, dispels the sudden awkwardness with an on-the-house plate of struzzichini—fried mozzarella, a rice ball, a potato ball, each of which Daniela cuts into four liliputian slices in honor of Cinzia’s ever-precarious diet.

“I think I agree with Cinzia,” Merisa suddenly announces—la spilla, your pin, Bente—it is a feather. All this time I saw a leaf, but now that I see a feather I can’t stop seeing the feather. Do you agree Daniela?

Per dire la verita, Daniela says to all of us, amused by her own silliness—I see una spilla, a piece of jewelry, white gold that is not really white gold and tiny pearls that at any moment could fall off the fragile wire they’ve been clinging to for fifty years. Mine is bent entirely out of shape at this point. Bente, how have you kept yours intact?

We all look at Bente’s pin and then at Bente, who we remark looks extraordinarily well for all she's been through. How delighted we are that she’s going against doctor’s orders and splashing red wine into her water.