My grandfather on my mother’s side had a fabric shop on the old Via Roma, before the ruthless gutting of that part of Turin in the 1930s. It was a long shadowy room, and it had only one window, facing perpendicular to Via Roma and set below street level. A few doors down there was another, parallel cave-like space, a café-bar that had been disguised as a grotto, with large brownish cement stalactites inset with small multicolored mirrors; in the back, a succession of vertical strips of mirror had been attached to the bar. These strips, I couldn’t say whether intentionally or by chance, were not level but attached at a slight angle to one another: that meant that when you walked past the front door of the bar, you saw your legs proliferate in the play of the mirrors, as if you had five or six instead of two, and the children of the time, us, that is, found this so amusing that we asked to be taken to Via Roma just to see it.
My grandfather’s surname wasn’t Ugotti, but everyone called him Monsù Ugotti because he’d bought the shop from a merchant of that name. The merchant must have been a popular fellow, because the name stuck to my uncles as well, and for a few years after the war there were some on Via Roma who even called me Monsù Ugotti.
My grandfather was a solemn and corpulent patriarch; he was witty, but he never laughed; he spoke little, with rare and precisely calibrated phrases, laden with meanings both patent and hidden, frequently ironic, always full of calm authority. I don’t believe that he ever read a book in his life; his world was bounded by home and shop, which could not have been more than four hundred meters apart, a distance that he walked four times a day. He was a skillful businessman, and at home an equally talented chef, but he set foot in the kitchen only on special occasions, to concoct exquisite but indigestible dishes; in that case, he would spend the whole day there, and banish all women, wife, daughters, and household help.
The staff of his shop was an odd collection of anomalous specimens of humanity. Against a drab background of frequently changing shop clerks loomed the perennial and good-natured bulk of Tota Gina, the cashier. She was indistinguishable from the cash register, the counter, and the high dais upon which the whole mass stood. Glimpsed from below, her majestic bosom spread across the surface of the counter, spilling over the edges like homemade dough. She had gold and silver teeth, and she’d give us Leone candies.
Monsù Ghiandone mispronounced his r’s and wore a toupee. Monsù Gili wore garish ties, chased women, and drank too much. Francesco (no Monsù to his name: he was a menial worker) came from Monferrato, and he was known as Sciapalfàr, Iron-Breaker, because he had once been attacked and, tearing loose one of the long cranks used to raise the awning, shattered the skull of his attacker. He knew how to walk on his hands, he could turn cartwheels, and after the shop was closed he’d even do a somersault over the sales counter.
Along with my grandfather and the clerks, two of my uncles also sold cloth. They probably would have preferred some other line of work, but my grandfather’s authority, never expressed with harsh words or even with orders, remained unquestioned and unquestionable. Among themselves, the sales staff spoke in Piedmontese dialect, inserting, however, twenty or so technical terms that the customers (and those customers were almost exclusively women) would never in theory be able to decipher, and which constituted a skeletal micro-parlance, an elementary but essential code, whose vocabulary was uttered rapidly and in a whisper.
Numbers played a primary role in this jargon: reduced for simplicity’s sake to a series of digits, which were of course coded, my grandfather used them to inform the sales clerk of the price to be offered (discounted, or, on the contrary, inflated) to this or that customer; in fact, there were no fixed prices, and they varied according to a customer’s personality, solvency, family ties, and other elusive factors. “Missià” referred to an annoying customer; “tërdes-un” (“thirteen-one”) was the most feared kind of customer, one who would make you pull forty different items down off the shelves, argue price and quality for two hours, and then leave without buying a thing. In recent times, the term had been deciphered, and by none other than a tërdes-un, who caused a scene; after that, the term was replaced by the equivalent “Savoy,” which also soon fell out of use. Other terms stood simply for “yes,” “no,” “hold out,” and “give in.”
My grandfather maintained cordial, but diplomatically complicated, relations with a number of his competitors, some of whom were also distant relatives. They would pay calls on one another’s shops that were at the same time spying missions, on Sunday afternoons they’d arrange Homeric banquets, and they called each other Signor Thief and Signor Fraudster. Relations with the shop clerks were also ambivalent. In the shop, the clerks were completely subjugated; occasionally, however, on Sundays when the weather was fine, my grandfather might invite them out on excursions to the Boringhieri beer hall (in what is now Piazza Adriano). Once, but only once, he even took them on the local train all the way to Beinasco.
Relations were unclouded, on the other hand, with the shopkeepers along Via Roma and neighboring areas who sold shoes, linen, jewelry, furniture, wedding dresses. My grandfather used to send the youngest and sharpest shop clerk over to the Porta Nuova station to greet trains coming in from the provinces: his job was to scout couples engaged to be married who had come to Turin to do their shopping, and steer them to the shop. But, once they’d bought the fabrics they needed, the young man’s mission continued: he had to tow the couple to the shops of the other, affiliated merchants, who were ready to return the favor, of course.
At Carnival, my grandfather invited all the grandchildren to watch the parade of allegorical floats from the shop’s balcony. In those days, Via Roma was paved with wonderful wooden tiles, providing a surface upon which the iron-shod hooves of the draft horses wouldn’t slip; electric tram tracks also ran up and down the street. My grandfather provided us with an abundant supply of confetti, but forbade us to throw streamers, especially when the weather was damp: a legend circulated in which a little boy had tossed a wet streamer over the tram wire and had been electrocuted.
At Carnival, my grandmother also came out onto the shop’s balcony, a rare event: she was a small, fragile woman, but her face bore the regal air of a mother of many children, and even in person she had the timeless, rapt expression that emanates from the portraits of our forebears in their massive frames. She herself came from an immense family, of twenty-one children, who had been scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind: one was an anarchist who had fled to France, another had been killed in the Great War, yet another was a renowned sculler and a neuropath, while one (the story was told in whispers and in tones of horror), when still in the care of a wet nurse, had been eaten in his crib by a pig.