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

and afternoons. We went out onto Corso Monforte, where at three in the afternoon the streetlights were already lit, and the umbrellas of the crowds of shoppers sliced through the drizzle. The expensive shops shone through the fog like caves of warmth, full of treasures that could nourish and heal, and the women lingering in front of the bright windows all looked like children on Christmas morning. Soon I would be picking up my daughter from the school bus and could forget the perverse adventures of my afternoon in the clasp of that small exacting hand. “Let’s stop somewhere,” said Nelda, in a happy voice. “And have a coffee.”

Needless to say, the detective never found anyone, though the two times I called him, he said: “I have a very promising lead, Signorina. It is a matter of days.”

I lost my money as I had known I would. Shortly thereafter, Nelda borrowed my black leather Azzedine Alaïa jacket and set off for a long visit to the Philosopher. And what did I do? In the weeks that followed, I abandoned the Delinquents’ Bar and began to wander the streets of the city among the coffee-break crowds, searching for the perfect cappuccino and the perfect bar to drink it in. Each bar I entered was for a few minutes a small shelter that I considered for myself. I was convinced that imbibing caffeine in some places brought you luck, and in others brought you failure and general woe. The beauty of the bar had nothing to do with it, nor did seediness guarantee good fortune. The glossy tearoom on Via Montenapoleone would have seemed to have been an obvious cliché, to be avoided, but in fact those mirrored rooms stuffed with marrons glacés and people whose faces, above their furs, had the same gleam of expensive candied fruits, felt lucky; just as the sinister artists’ hangout down on Via Brera had something indefinably wrong about its atmosphere and its cappuccino.

The barmen in some places were skilled at producing a crisp, dry halo of milk foam, and in others produced a creamier nimbus. Some could draw flowers with the powdered chocolate sprinkled on top; and one lost master, hidden from the world in a tiny establishment on the glum middle-class shopping street Viale Piave, presented his cups sketched with a tiny, ephemeral chocolate face that regarded one pensively as one pensively drank.

I drank many nondescript cups of milk and coffee, and a few great ones, but a poker-faced film-noir angel never did spring up beside me and tap me on the shoulder. At the same time I received an assignment from a magazine to write about Milan high life; and one evening, fastened into a black velvet dress and lined up on a white couch in a row of other women, like a line of drinks on a counter, I met the man who was to become my second husband. And then there was love, the indescribable, and my mornings in bars became something much more ordinary: the concluding acts of trysts. My lover, a small, elegant, good-hearted man, whose mixed aristocratic Venetian and Sicilian blood gave him ancestral depths of worldliness and cunning that I could only guess at, quickly put the delinquents at the Bar Opera in their place, shouldering up to the counter and ordering for me with a rich man’s impregnable self-confidence. I could see the delinquents were impressed; they were, after all, consummate material men, and he exuded success on their terms. There was fatherly approval in their eyes as they regarded us together. I was no longer that disquieting figure: a female stray, a waif who had to pay for her own coffee.

A year later, when my daughter and I left Milan, and went to start a new life with my husband in Torino, one of the first things I did in that city, out of a sort of reflex, was to start looking for a place to have my daily cappuccino. I visited the extravagant Art Nouveau bars along Via Po and Corso Vittorio, where the courtiers of the Kingdom of Italy had languished in the mid-nineteenth century, nibbling lobster sandwiches among the brass and stained glass and polished wood, and chatting in their French-accented Italian of the latest vicissitudes of the House of Savoy. For a few weeks I went to a small pizzeria and bar in a rustic village center not far from my house in the hills overlooking the city, a bar frequented by a sort of village idiot called IlMatto, who went around in a triangular sheepskin cap, sometimes clutching a piece of raw meat. Il Matto was considered picturesque, and I tried to feel privileged as I clutched my cup and listened to his high-pitched chatter, but the cappuccino was watery, so I abandoned the village square for an establishment I had discovered down by the river Po. This tiny place, called Il Bar del Buon Caffe—the Bar of Good Coffee—had an unreconstructed postwar interior of apple green linoleum and aluminum tubular trim that suggested an American diner.

Inside, a strange tight-lipped Piedmontese family with the vertical faces of Visigoths served small floral cups of the best cappuccino I had ever had in my life. A wall plaque in folkloric Piedmontese dialect informed customers that the proprietors had indeed won some kind of regional coffee-making contest. There were only two small tables, squeezed against the windows, and at ten-thirty in the morning a crowd of well-heeled Torinese housewives, in their uniform of streaked blond hair, earth-colored tweed and cashmere, and handmade sport shoes, would press in with their umbrellas and bags of shopping. I liked sitting there with my wonderful drink—the powdered cocoa on top was mixed with raw sugar—breathing in the expensive perfume of these women, and listening to their breathtakingly pedestrian talk about golf and suntans and servants. Torino had weather as bad as that of Milan, but in that atmosphere I felt that I had banished uncertainty and