Amore and Amaretti (16 page)

Instead of museums and art galleries on my day off, I hang around shops. The six days spent boxed up at Spedaluzzo with neither need nor time to spend my hard-earned lire result in a desire almost physical to do so each Tuesday when I descend upon Florence. My list of items such as cotton balls and talcum powder is briskly attended to in stores like UPIM and Standa, after which I am free to roam, dipping into small side streets and across bridges, alternating between dusty forgotten pockets and expensive fashionable ones.

My camera accompanies me, slung over my shoulder alongside my handbag strap. I take photographs of bakeries and cheese shops, German tourists eating
gelato
, a circlet of old men standing chatting outside a bar, a sudden glimpse through complicated wrought-iron gates of inner courtyards. Pictures snap of bloodless mannequins in designer-shop windows, and a gypsy woman sitting cross-legged in front of a Brunelleschi door, her head bowed over a white lamb in the afternoon shade of the Duomo. In the Boboli Gardens, the camera captures a timeless moment, when before me like a painting I am offered the tableau of a boy in a bath to escape the heat. A long, lean youth has climbed into an Etruscan bath on a mound of pebbles in a corner of coolness, his head thrown back against the green-grey stone.

I see the coat of my dreams in a slick minimalist shop off Via de' Tornabuoni. It is black ankle-length pure wool, soft as moss, lined with satin and double-breasted. With its slightly padded shoulders and nipped-in waist, it instantly transforms me into a small blonde Anna Karenina. It costs a month's salary and I force myself to consider the impulse over a beer at Paskowski's. This, the beer, is always part of the ritual and, in spite of the haughty waiters in white jackets who bring tiny dishes of salted biscuits to accompany my drink, the black-toothed woman in charge of the toilets always greets me warmly. I extract postcards of Tuscan countryside from a brown paper bag and spend the next forty minutes engrossed in writing on the backs of them. Then I quickly march off to the coat shop, suddenly terrified that my coat is already gone, and when I discover it still there I immediately reserve it. Naturally.

Alvaro comes to save us, a short black Florentine with darting, dancing black eyes with a gently sloping paunch that hides the waistband of his apron. He loads and unloads the dishwasher with energy, washes sinkfuls of lettuces, mushrooms and leeks, springs sycophantically into the role of Gianfranco's sidekick and becomes my new friend. He is full of jokes, winks and songs; the corners of his mouth are used to store cigarettes and the restless beginnings of funny stories. I love him more when I discover his annual custom of participating in Calcio in Costume: a traditional Florentine procession of soccer teams dressed in medieval costume. He drinks too much, calls me ‘Vickovski', and occupies the little alcove Vera used to inhabit. He becomes a buffer for Gianfranco's moods and tantrums and Ignazio's surly silences. I smell his cigarette smoke in the darkness from the room I have made cluttered and snug, through whose window late into the night I continue to hear sounds of groups leaving the restaurant, car doors slamming and choruses of
‘buona notte'
.

On my days off in Florence, I sometimes cut my way through the crowds congesting the Ponte Vecchio to visit Lidia in her leather shop. Lidia is blonde, a translucent-skinned Sussex girl who has been living in Florence for the past twenty years – she is almost Italian. The partner of Fabio, our jack of all trades, she was first introduced to me long ago when I was Gianfranco's girlfriend, but it is really only now that we have cultivated a friendship of sorts. She manages the elegant, expensive boutique for a Florentine who is largely absent, and if I arrive too early for her to take her break I observe her with customers. With Italians she slips easily into relaxed idiomatic Tuscan; with the tourists she is polite and English. Then she is locking the door and clipping in her smart, heeled boots over the bridge with me, heading to a favourite bar for lunch.

We sit in the cool interior and talk. I usually begin, because I must spill out the past six days of Spedaluzzo to a sympathetic Anglo-Saxon female who speaks the same language – who, moreover, is familiar with the cast of characters whose latest exasperating, upsetting or bewildering behaviour I am now describing. There is such a comfort for me in her calm, resigned presence, in the way she lightly rests the spout of the ceramic teapot against her curled fingers as she pours, in her prolonged understanding nods and murmurs of ‘I know, I know'. I tell her about the latest batch of eleven-and-a-half-hour working days, and about the tantrum that Gianfranco threw after I accidentally knocked over two containers of sauce in the refrigerator – admittedly on to his newly cleaned floor – and the way he started seizing things from the fridge and demanding to know why I needed four lots of cream and two separate packages of pancetta, before hurling them to the ground. How I then flounced out of the kitchen and up to the sanctuary of my bedroom.

I describe how my jeans are acquiring that strained level of discomfort because of all the bread and cheese and wine I so chronically consume. I relate the cruel comments Gianfranco made about my latest haircut, and how distressingly distant Ignazio is. How cloistered and claustrophobic it becomes, quickly, between all of us working and living there together. How when Gianfranco challenged me as to why I don't dream up new pasta sauces to have as weekly specials I explained that the few times I did he would laugh and tell me, ‘We Italians don't eat that sort of thing,' but then later would ask me to think up an interesting way to bake the round zucchini he had just brought back from the markets. So, just the usual mixture of coldness and kindness.

Lidia listens with unswerving patience, making soothing noises as she forks cake into her lipsticked mouth. Because I have worked myself up, I tell her how easy it is to lose sight of the fact that couth, civilised, intelligent life pulsates beyond the small portal of La Cantinetta. Then I stop talking, sit back and allow her to take over. Even though she has not been able to resolve any of my frustrations and worries, the mere act of pouring them all out has rendered them manageable, even a little humorous.

Meanwhile, Lidia gratefully accepts the opportunity to unburden herself. I hear the next instalment in the tale of the house renovations, which seem to have been going on interminably. It is a nightmare. She is worn down by the chaos in which they live; Fabio is so fantastically busy helping other people with their projects that he has little time to spare for their own. And then, of course, she must cook and clean and do all the servile things expected of Italian women, in spite of the long hours she works in the shop. I know she loves Fabio, but sometimes it is hard to glimpse affection through the litany of complaints against him. Sometimes we find ourselves lapsing back into Italian when it seems that the matching English expression does not sufficiently convey the sense or the sentiment. Then we catch ourselves, and laugh. Afterwards, outside the bar, we wrap our arms around each other before separating, and I know that for her, as for me, the feeling of being fortified will remain for a long time. It will get us through.

Chi mangia e non invita, possa strozzarsi con ogni mollica

He who eats alone and invites no one may choke with every crumb

Even knowing that my time here is both finite (home before it becomes seriously cold, home for Christmas) and instructional does not prevent regular assaults of loneliness. ‘You exclude yourself,' Gianfranco tells me, referring to my tendency in a late-night post-work group to head off to bed well before anyone else, to mostly dine alone, to submerge into the pages of a novel while all around me a jovial, noisy conversation takes place. The fact is that, older this time round, I find myself less amiably tolerant of traits I once found so charming. As I am no longer anyone's girlfriend, I am able to be my resolute Australian self, refusing (at least in spirit) to bow to the essentially chauvinistic character around me. I am outraged when I learn how Gianfranco expects Cinzia and me to clean the awful bathroom, despite the fact that we all work the same long hours; I am appalled rather than amused when I witness evidence of marital infidelity on the part of husbands, even though I know most wives take it for granted.

I find myself irritated by the facility for spontaneity and the relative, dubious, subjective concept of ‘time'. I always used to love the looseness with which rules are applied, an almost inability to take anything truly seriously, and yet now am often frustrated by it. The passion poured into the most trivial of emotions, experience or anecdote at times exhausts me, and I find myself longing for the laconic texture of Australian life. Six days of the week boxed inside that big old hilltop building – with its fading Spedaluzzo sign on the side wall, the heavy green gates chained shut and padlocked each night – make for an odd existence. Invariably, each Tuesday night, when I have caught the blue bus back from Florence, I sit for a couple of hours over a letter to sisters or friends in which the usual self-absorbed scrutiny of my inner life goes on.

In fact, I see how my reaction is a function not only of my upbringing and culture, but perhaps more significantly of my own insecurities. Unpredictability always throws me out; unpunctuality and behaviour outside of expectation leave me thin-lipped with disapproval. And yet, all those years ago, younger and more malleable, I was charmed by the ease with which one's path could be diverted, and it seemed that if I stayed long enough in Italy I too might become spontaneous.

I used to love the way, en route to an appointment, Gianfranco and I would bump into someone we knew, and immediately be bundled off to the nearest bar for a coffee. Everyone operated like this, so it was perfectly acceptable to be late. It is a talent for living, and living fully for the moment, involving oneself completely in the landscape of life. In the face of it, I see how pinched and deliberate my own life is – and yet I am incapable of changing.

A chi trascura il poco mancherà pane e fuoco

Be grateful for what you have