At the Trattoria
I often have lunch at a trattoria close to my house. It’s a hole in the wall, so if I don’t get there by noon I won’t get a seat, and I’ll have to wait until after two. I eat alone, next to others eating alone. They’re people I don’t know, though I frequently encounter a familiar face.
A father cooks, and his daughter waits the tables. I believe the mother died when the daughter was a young girl. This father and daughter share a bond beyond their common blood, one that’s been fortified by grief. They’re not from around here. Though they work all day on a noisy street, they come from an island. They store the sun’s blaze in their bones, barren hills dotted with sheep, the mistral that churns the sea. I picture them together on a boat they’ve anchored in front of a secluded grotto. I see the daughter diving off the prow, and the father holding a fish that’s still breathing in his hands.
Technically the daughter isn’t a waitress, given that she’s almost always behind the counter.
“What can we get you?”
The menu is handwritten on the blackboard in a compact, whimsical script. I choose a different dish each day of the week. She takes the order and then tells her father, who’s always in the kitchen, what to prepare.
When I sit down the daughter brings me a bottle of water, a paper napkin, then resumes her place behind the counter. I wait for my tray to appear, then stand up to retrieve it.
Today, among the tourists and employees who frequent my neighborhood, there’s a young father with his daughter. She’s around ten years old, with two blond braids, hunched shoulders, a distracted gaze. Normally I see them on Saturdays, but there’s no school this week, it’s Easter vacation.
By now I know the drill: the daughter refuses to sleep at her father’s house, she’ll only spend the night with her mother. I used to see them back when they were a family of three, in this very trattoria. I remember when the mother was pregnant with the daughter, and how excited the couple was. I recall how intimately they would speak to one another, and the good wishes expressed by those sitting around them. They would come to have lunch here even after they became a family. They’d turn up, tired and hungry, after going to the playground, or shopping for food in the piazza. I felt a connection with the little girl, an only child like me, seated between her parents. It’s just that my father never liked eating in restaurants.
Last year the mother moved out of our neighborhood, leaving the father behind. And he’s frustrated, I’d say exasperated, by the daughter, who remains so loyal to her mother, who refuses to stay at his place, in the house where she was first raised, in the room always awaiting her arrival.
The daughter plays with her cell phone while the father attempts to speak to her, to convince her. I feel sorry listening to him plead. I feel sorry for the parting of ways between this father and daughter, and for the demise of the marriage. Apparently the mother left because he was cheating on her, a passionate affair that’s already ended.
“How was school last week?” he asks.
The girl shrugs. “Can you give me a ride to a friend’s place tonight?”
“I thought you and I might go to the movies.”
“I don’t feel like it. I want to go to my friend’s.”
“What will you do there?”
“I’ll have fun.”
“And then?”
“I’ll go home to Mom’s.”
The father gives in. He stops trying, this week, to convince her. Now he, too, looks at his cell phone. She only eats part of her dish, and he finishes it for her.
In Spring
In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me, I find it depleting. The new light disorients, the fulminating nature overwhelms, and the air, dense with pollen, bothers my eyes. To calm my allergies I take a pill in the morning that makes me sleepy. It knocks me out, I can’t focus, and by lunchtime I’m tired enough to go to bed. I sweat all day and at night I’m freezing. No shoe seems right for this temperamental time of year.
Every blow in my life took place in spring. Each lasting sting. That’s why I’m afflicted by the green of the trees, the first peaches in the market, the light flowing skirts that the women in my neighborhood start to wear. These things only remind me of loss, of betrayal, of disappointment. I dislike waking up and feeling pushed inevitably forward. But today, Saturday, I don’t have to leave the house. I can wake up and not have to get up. There’s nothing better.
In the Piazza
The daughter of two friends of mine lives alone, like me, in this city. But she’s only sixteen. She arrived three years ago with her father, her stepmother, and a stepbrother much younger than she is. The father is a painter and had a big fellowship at an academy up on the hill. I’d met them at one of his exhibits. The painter and his wife used to come to my place for Italian lessons. The daughter never joined them. She attended a high school nearby, and two years later she decided not to return to her country of origin, to separate early from her family and stay on here. She has a room in an apartment the high school oversees, a special residence to house students in her situation.
I call her when there’s an exhibit I want to see, or when the sales begin at the end of winter and the start of summer. I’d promised my friends I’d keep an eye on her, even though this girl doesn’t need very much from me.
I watch her as she cycles through the piazza. She could be my daughter given that I’m thirty years older. But she’s already a woman, with a beauty that’s disarming. A girl who smiles as she speaks, as if to declare to the world, See how happy I am. Nothing like I was at that age: still a child, no boyfriends, ill at ease. I’m envious. I still regret my squandered youth, the absence of rebellion.
She’s just come back after spending a week with her family. She’s relieved to have put some distance between them again. She tells me that spending seven days in a row together is rough: that her father and stepmother are always bickering and that they should separate.
“Don’t they love each other?”
“I doubt it. My dad just wants to paint and she’s at loose ends, she waits on him hand and foot and it drives him crazy.”
“And your mother? Did you see her?”
“She got married again, to a guy I don’t like.”
She drinks a glass of pomegranate juice. It looks like a glass of blood, though I don’t tell her that. She says she’s hungry and asks for a cornetto. She splits it in half, then divides one of the pieces. She takes a small bite, then arranges the rest of the pieces on her napkin.
People turn to look at her as we’re sitting in the piazza but she doesn’t pay them heed. She’s fluent in the language her parents struggled to speak. She doesn’t look like a tourist or foreigner, she’s the type that fits in anywhere.