“THIS PLACE IS LIKE AN ESCHER PAINTING!” Thessy screamed in frustration. “That’s it, Catanzaro is Escherville!”I had come late to the Giallorossa, the soccer sports bar and pizzeria, my first night back in town and had taken a table in the back but with a full view of the TV screen. It was showing the latest Reggio loss, which would kick it back down to Serie B.
I noticed a woman sitting by herself directly under the TV, reading. Her long graying hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her angular face was rosy white.
The waiter was uncharacteristically brusque for a Calabrese, but he paused a moment when I asked who the mysterious woman was. “I don’t know,” he said. “But she comes in here from time to time—and always by herself.”
“Does she speak Italian?”
“Yes, but she’s not Italian.” He looked over at her. “She must be English or American.”
For some time I had been anxious to speak to someone, anyone,
an outsider with whom I could compare notes. Calabria isn’t Venice or Florence, where every other person you see is a tourist oohing or aahing or complaining about the rude Italian waiters. I approached the table and I addressed her in Italian. “Mi scusi, signora, ma ho pensato che, forse, Lei parla l’inglese?”
She looked up from her book, her blue eyes beautiful but cold. “A chi vuole conoscere?” And who wants to know?
“I’m sorry,” I said hastily in Italian. “I’m from New York, and for a moment I thought you might be, too.” Embarrassed, I walked away.
“Wait,” she called out to me in accented English. “You’re from New York? So you speak English?” Her voice almost cracked.
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“Oh, no. My God, please, please join me,” she said. “Could you?”
“I’d be thrilled,” I said, and I really was.
I had barely sat down before she began talking in English. “I’m sorry to seem so rude. But I thought that perhaps you were some young Italian man who, at night’s end, was desperate for a female companion.”
I learned that Thessy was Swiss. She and her husband, a painter from New York City, had lived in Florence now for several years. A specialist in historical costume design, she had gone to Urbino a few years before, after an earthquake had cracked open tombs there that dated back to the Middle Ages, in order to study the clothes the corpses were wearing.
Now Thessy was in Catanzaro, far from the Renaissance riches of Urbino and Florence. She had accepted a well-paying job at a newly formed technical design school in Calabria, figuring it might be exciting to teach in this poor southern province. She had negotiated an arrangement to teach three days a week and fly back to Florence to be with her husband on the weekends and had signed a yearlong contract.
But this weekend she was stuck in Catanzaro because of an airline strike that had begun on Friday. Everyone knows of Italian
strikes; sciopero is one of the first words tourists traveling anywhere in Italy learn. The railroad workers go on strike, the airline workers strike, truckers strike. But an entire industry doesn’t strike at the same time. It strikes by division: one day it’s the pilots; the next it’s the controllers. The strikes are reported in the newspapers a week ahead of time, and no single group can strike more than once in the same month.
I was scheduled to return to New York in five days, but when I read in the papers that yet another segment of the airlines, the food services, was going to strike the day I was supposed to leave (after which was a holiday, then another scheduled strike), I decided to fly out a day earlier rather than stay another week. I needed to get back to work, and I didn’t want to impose on my relatives any longer.
I would have enjoyed an extra weekend in Catanzaro, but for Thessy, it was a life sentence, which led her to describe the city as Escherville. The haphazard planning of the city, with its incongruous mix of old and new architecture, did resemble an Escher Möbius strip.
The owner of the restaurant, a man with longish graying hair and a mustache, came to the table and asked us in dialect if we wanted anything else. Thessy ordered another liter of wine. The owner gave us, or rather me, an impressive grin, cocked his head, and said, “Right away”
“Look,” Thessy said. “They think they’re matchmakers. That they’ve created a couple.”
I asked her about her students. I figured that as a Swiss she was probably underwhelmed by Italian education in general and likely appalled by the schools in the south. But she said the students were better prepared than she had expected.
“They are, after all, somewhat better educated than the Americans I teach.
“Really!” she continued, in response to my dubious look. “The Americans are rich, so sure of themselves, but they have no awareness of anything else around them. They want, want, want.”
“And the Italian students?”
“In general, very good.” She emptied the liter. “Down here,
though, the girls just want to get married. The boys, they are still boys. But that’s all over Italy.”
The waiter brought our bill and made an extravagant display of placing it in front of us. We left the money and stood up.
“Oh, my God,” Thessy said, “I am drunk.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Me, too. But don’t worry. I’ll walk you to your hotel.”
“Where are you staying?” Thessy asked.
“Albergo Grand Hotel.”
“Ah, that’ll be easy then. That’s where I’m staying.”
I offered her my arm, so she could descend the stairs easily.
“Oh, yes, very good.” She giggled. “Let’s give them something to talk about tonight.”
A cool Ionian breeze from the mountains funneled through Catanzaro’s streets.
Rather then walk along the main drag, I suggested we take a couple of side streets, which I hoped might be more scenic.
“Be careful of these potholes, Mark,” Thessy warned loudly “They are the product of poor urban planning. This city is built on a mountain of sand—sand! And below the concrete streets pits have been known to open up. It happens all throughout the south … . Just last year in Naples an electrician was doing work on the side of a building, and his ladder and he were instantaneously sucked up by the earth. He was never found!”
It was past eleven. Two young men hanging around in front of a dully lit café nodded as we passed.
“Look at these streets! At one time, beautiful architecture, I’m sure. But now, look at the eyesores that these poor people have put up,” she said, indicating a square cinder-block building. “What other city would let something like this be built?”
I could think of many places in Europe and in the United States, even New York, that had at one time allowed ugly, cheap buildings to be constructed.
“They’re not so bad,” I said.
“You’re an American,” she said. “You see the good in everything.”
“You’ve been living in the north too long,” I said. “Calabria has a bad reputation throughout Italy, I know, which makes it easy—acceptable—for everyone to see the ugliness, the dirt.”
I did recognize that, compared with other Italian cities, Catanzaro was one ugly, poorly planned mess. But my eyes had chosen to focus on the medieval facades tucked away in side streets or the tiny alleys lined with potted flowers.
We came out on Piazza Indipendenza, directly in front of city hall and our hotel. Thessy stopped. “Look at that monstrosity,” she cried. The focal point of the piazza was a concrete staircase leading nowhere. Thessy said, “We should get back to the hotel.” She seemed exhausted by so much ugliness.
At the front desk the clerk locked eyes with me, unsmiling. I knew he knew which rooms were ours, but he would not reach for the keys until we asked for them by number. He made a conscious effort not to create a sense of familiarity.
“Do you notice the people who stay here who gather around seven-thirty or so in the morning?” Thessy asked.
“I’m never up that early,” I said.
“They are all lawyers,” she said. “The clean-cut, boring ones are state lawyers, and the ones with the long hair and jewelry are the ones hired by the mob.”
From the outside the five-story building looked like a generic new apartment building anywhere in Italy, but the entire first floor housed the university where Thessy worked. I had agreed to meet her there two days after our dinner. She had told the directors about me, and they were eager to meet me. I stepped into a very modern office, where a secretary greeted me and called the director.
The director was a slim man in his mid-thirties wearing wire-frame glasses. He called me into the office of the university’s president and vice-president—his father and mother, respectively. His mother was curious about my name and told me her mother was also a Rotella. The director then gave me a tour of the school. It was modern and spare. The classrooms all had brand-new chairs, desks,
and new Apple computers. Thessy had told me that the school received considerable grants from the state and charged its students only a nominal tuition. She had praised the school’s progressive thinking and adventurous curriculum, but she had the impression that under-the-table deals enabled the school to continue.
Just before I was to go, the director took me to Thessy’s class. Her students, all women, were presenting their final designs. One design was of a brightly colored purse, another of a wedding dress. Thessy had described the prevalent style as “tacky, over the top.” Perhaps it was, but of course, Calabria had given birth to Gianni Versace.
Thessy walked me out. She said, “You know, Marco, yesterday was a beautiful day I walked all over Catanzaro. I found those streets you were talking about, and you know, I finally saw Catanzaro through your eyes—with your American optimism. And there are some very attractive—appealing—elements to the city. There is actually some charm here. But I could be feeling that only because I’m leaving today”
That evening in Gimigliano I met Giuseppe at his store in time for the passeggiata. Giuseppe’s son Domenico, still home from the university on vacation, was watching the store. The three of us walked along Corso America. It was a beautiful spring afternoon. I took off my jacket and breathed in the soft mountain air. Flowers seemed to have bloomed overnight in all the balcony flowerpots.
“Ah,” Giuseppe said, “you can practice your Russian.” He pointed to a tall blond couple in warm-up suits and white sneakers.
Giuseppe introduced us. Peter and Marlissa were in their early twenties and spoke Italian with heavy Slavic accents. They were from Ukraine and had been living here for a year as paid caretakers of an elderly couple whose sons lived in the north and who had outlived their other relatives.
“It’s lonely here,” Marlissa said. “It’s tough when you don’t have family You say hello to people as you pass, but you never really get to know anyone else.”
The money was good, much better than in Ukraine. In another two years they thought they’d have saved enough to go back to Ukraine to buy a house.
“You must miss your family,” I said, missing my wife just then.
“Actually, my father died a long time ago, and I am bringing my mother here next month to live with us,” Marlissa whispered. “But it’s difficult, because we can never leave Gimigliano. We can’t go to Catanzaro to meet other people our age.”
“So your employers need a lot of care?” I said.
“No, we are here illegally,” Marlissa said, again quietly, though not as if she were hiding; in fact, it was impossible to imagine that anyone in Gimigliano did not know “You see, if we get caught without our papers, they will send us back.”
I wondered if this circumspection was the result of years of Communist fear.
“Anyway,” Marlissa continued, “when a policeman—or any man here—sees a blond Ukrainian woman traveling by herself, they automatically think she’s a whore.”
Peter nodded in agreement.
At dinner that evening I told Giuseppe and his family that I had cut my trip short by two days to avoid the strike and would be leaving the day after next. Giuseppe looked hurt, and his wife, Elena, seemed disappointed.
“But what about Longobucco?” Giuseppe said. “You haven’t seen Longobucco. It’s a long way away, but beautiful. The artisans there are known for their wood carving.”
“I’ll be back in two months,” I reminded them. But as I spoke, two months seemed a long way away
“Va bene, we’ll plan a big dinner for you tomorrow night,” Giuseppe announced.
“I think I’m going to have dinner with my family tomorrow night,” I said. I felt an emptiness in my belly when I saw the look on Giuseppe’s face. Giuseppe was the reason that I had found my family,
the reason why I continued to return. He and Elena had become family. I didn’t know how to express this to them.
“But what about the limoncello we made?” Giuseppe asked.
The limoncello was to have been our goodbye drink. I felt selfish. It seemed rude not to have left time for them to send me off, to bid me farewell.
“It’ll be warmer when you come back in June,” Elena said. Giuseppe looked out the window and said nothing. “And Martha, she’s coming with you, yes?”
I assured Elena she was.
Giuseppe quickly turned around and said, “We’ll open the bottle when you come back.” He seemed to be forcing a smile, a Calabrese smile that let me know nothing was bothering him. But it bothered me.
Elena had prepared fraguni, calzones filled with eggs, ricotta, and chopped parsley, followed by a simple pasta with tomato sauce, then fava beans cooked in their shells with bread crumbs and pecorino cheese. It was a meal that made me homesick in advance for Gimigliano. For dessert, she brought out dried figs that had been halved and filled with crushed hazelnuts and chopped mandarin orange rind, then baked to warm softness.
“You and your father,” she said, shaking her head. “I always have to have figs around.”