Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

Milan, and eventually America. And I feel sorry that I wasn’t able to show you the mountains from my house.

I drive on, still glad to be alone but feeling strangely diminished now that you are not beside me anymore. All the rest of the afternoon I go around feeling that I’ve lost something. Something as essential and indefinable as a shadow. I wonder if you feel the same way. Maybe you’ll tell me, when I visit you.

About Fog and Cappuccino

During my second autumn in Milan, I would always stop in at the Delinquents’ Bar on my way back from dropping my daughter off for school. The bus from the American School stopped in front of the Hotel Milan, and so from our apartment in Via Monte di Pieta we had a long walk through the fog. At that opaque morning hour the streetlights still made big blurred cat’s-eyes in the muffling gray; the legendary shops of Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga, which just a few hours later would be filled with hordes of reckless women battling for luxuries, were shuttered. The antique palaces that had been turned into banks and boardrooms for the making and reshuffling of new money and new ideas were still unlit, revealing themselves through the thick numbing atmosphere in Piranesian glimpses of barrel vaults and muscular caryatids. It was a purgatorial landscape through which to guide a six-year-old girl every morning, a landscape that illustrated my dreary bemusement at finding myself, at my own initiative, suddenly unmarried and making a new home in a foreign city.

My daughter, the subject of much guilty pondering, was, in fact, obstinately cheerful in the midst of the fog. Full of oatmeal and orange juice, she skipped along in her dark blue jacket and mittens, chattering and laughing at the top of her lungs. While walking she liked to play a game called Torture and Forgive, in which she would pretend to crush my fingers, squeezing them as tight as she could in her own small, fierce grasp, and then raising my hand to her lips, where she would undo the damage with kisses. On our route, there were certain things we couldn’t look at because they brought bad luck: a monstrous rubber plant in the window of a pharmacy; the flyblown diamond earrings in the grimy showcase windows of the Hotel Milan, which apparently had not been refurbished since Verdi died there, and was famous for its cockroaches. We stood with our backs to the diamonds until the school bus came. When my daughter stood on the steps of the bus and I kissed her cold red cheeks, her face would blaze out at me from her dark hood like a fiery rose.

Then I was alone and it was time for my cappuccino. In Italy cappuccino has not taken on the overblown dimensions it has acquired in America, and remains a spare and seemly breakfast drink. Whether it is good, really good, depends not just on the lightness of its foam, the perfection of its mixture of strong coffee and bland milk, the correctness of its temperature. To my mind, it has to incorporate a slight taste of misery as well, a tinge of bitterness or sadness that has nothing to do with the provenance of the beans but is drawn from the surroundings in which it is drunk. From this point of view, the cappuccino served in the Delinquents’ Bar was nearly perfect.

The D.B. was a neighborhood bar of mine—in fact, it was on the ground floor of my apartment house—and was really called Bar Opera, in honor of the fact that La Scala was a block away. I’d renamed it because it was a gathering place for a peculiar subspecies of the generally fashionable denizens of central Milan: ten or fifteen sidewalk loan sharks and ruffianly small-time dealers in gold and jewelry. These men spent their mornings hanging about the sidewalk in front of the great stone facade of the Monte di Pieta Bank, which was a few doors up the street and had since the Middle Ages been the public pawnshop of Milan. There they lay in wait for the desperate souls whose offerings were too scanty for the official exchange. Often the carabinieri would pull up, and they would scatter like a flock of vultures, to regroup a few minutes later around an old man brandishing a pair of silver forks, or a woman in a worn fur coat who furtively displayed a set of cameos. It was an odd sight in a neighborhood where the normal uniform for men and women was English sports clothes, or suits by Armani, Valentino, and Versace; where chauffeurs and bodyguards hung about idly outside gateways through which manicured gardens could be seen like glimpses of Arcadia. Yet the Milanese are pragmatic enough to comprehend the sudden ascents and collapses of fortune—to see that the easy wealth they seek and enjoy must have its spectral reverse side in the gray mornings at the Monte di Pieta.

So one by one the delinquents used to materialize out of the fog as I sat on a high slippery stool, sipping my cappuccino and glancing through La Repubblica. They would order coffee and grappa, greeting each other with a weary matutinal precision, like employees checking in at an office. In looks they were a brilliant cast. Their leader was a short muscular fellow, wide as a refrigerator, with a fixed carnivorous grin and glistening gelled hair that seemed to begin at his eyebrows and swept back all the way to the base of his fat neck, where it turned up in a dandified flip. His principal colleague was a tall pimply blank-eyed lad with a straw-colored pompadour and an anarchic snaggle to his teeth; he dressed in striped suits, and never have stripes looked sadder or scarier.

Giovanni and Giacomo, the father and son who owned and ran Bar Opera, detested their clientele. They once confided to me that they