I FINISHED THE CLASSIC LYCEUM at the age of eighteen, and after a couple of weeks of vacation and a major discussion, most of it a one-way discussion, about the university department I should enroll in, the family, which is to say my father, decided I should study law.
Just upstairs from Harry’s Bar was the office of Ferruccio Ferrarin, a criminal lawyer of the old school, and Ferrarin had been our customer since the day the bar opened. So after a brief negotiation between Mr. Ferrarin and my father, the terms of which I was never told, I was shut up in a windowless little room to work as his clerk.
I knew absolutely nothing about law, one reason being that since the end of World War I — after the glut of murders and killings in which the dead were the guilty and the murderers the heroes — there had been little talk about law in Italy. But I thoroughly enjoyed accompanying the lawyer to the courthouses in all the little towns in the Veneto, not only because of the excitement of the court trials, but because he had an absolutely terrifying way of driving his sports car. He had a tic: he would shut both eyes for three or four endless seconds and twist his face in a variety of grimaces, preferably when he was doing close to a hundred miles an hour with an enormous trailer truck coming in the opposite direction. I sat by his side ready to grab the wheel a second before we crashed.
The trials themselves were fun to watch too, but I noticed that Ferrarin’s speeches made more of an impression on me and the loafers and idlers who always attend criminal trials than on the judges, who tended to nod off, only to be awakened brusquely by the lawyer’s thundering voice. On the whole he won very few cases, but his clients always seemed extremely gratified by his high-sounding discourses. They may not have been much use, but they were totally fascinating, especially if you didn’t understand what he was saying, and most of all because they made the accused feel certain he was getting his money’s worth.
Then the day came for my first examination. My father greeted me early in the morning before he left the house, and my mother was rather emotional as she saw me off, as if I were leaving for the Crusades. I took that first examination about two in the afternoon and barely passed. I called home at three o’clock to give the news and was ordered to report to the cash register at Harry’s Bar at 6:00 on the dot.
“You’ll never be a great lawyer,” my father said with absolute conviction. “So you’d better get used to working here.”
My father’s remark is still vivid in memory. At the time I never even thought of challenging it. It is probably just as well that things turned out as they did. Later in life I found that what may at first seem like a defeat or a sacrifice subsequently proves to be an absolute necessity and the source of future benefits. Lino Toffolo, a great Venetian comic actor, once told me that when he was a boy his father often said: “Since you’re an idiot, you’ll make a good infantryman.” You might think that his father’s drastic judgment would have created tragic mental problems for the boy Lino, but it did not. Toffolo became one of the finest comic actors in the Venetian dialect.
My father was concerned by the near failure of my first exam, but he never even considered the idea of taking me out of school. The cash register was simply my first taste of a job — a safety valve, a warning that work represented the real world. But he expected me to keep up my studies all the while.
So I kept my nose to the grindstone, and somehow I managed to pass all five of my examinations that first year and the next year as well. At the same time, I worked at Harry’s Bar a couple of days a week and almost every evening after ten o’clock, when my father went home. The cash register was a very old American NCR, which had taken the place of an Italian RIV that was always breaking down. RIV was a well-known Italian ball-bearing company. My father had a remarkable sense of humor, and he suggested that the Germans lost the war because they used RIV ball bearings in the wheels of their tanks.
I cannot honestly say that I paid much attention to my surroundings in those first years of work at Harry’s Bar. I don’t think I really understood all that much about how things were done there. I’m not sure I did even when my father retired, and at the tender age of twenty-five I took over the family business.
The Zen masters preach that their disciples should kill the Buddha, their friends and relatives, and their own fathers. Stuff and nonsense, if you ask me. I have never understood this business about inborn patricidal wishes, though I admit I have occasionally noticed in my own children a faint tendency to wish me dead. They accuse me of being authoritarian and making everyone else’s decisions, and they tell me that, in this regard as in all others, I’m the opposite of my own father. But this just goes to show that they knew Giuseppe Cipriani only in his old age, when he always played the part of the overindulgent grandfather. When I compare myself with him, my impression is that I am far too permissive and accommodating.
Kill my father? The thought never even crossed my mind. I never ceased to be fascinated by him — by my father, the man the Zen masters would have advised me to kill so that I could continue to live. I remember the simplicity of his every gesture, the delicacy of his hands as he shook a tower of ice, and the light touch he applied to everything he did.
That was probably when I understood, albeit unconsciously, the importance of adjectives our lives, the meaning that they give to the work of man. There are myriad ways of doing things, and each of them can be described with extraordinary precision. How? With adjectives.
We had a very snobbish customer, and whenever you asked how the food was, he would always reply, “Divine.” It was the only adjective he knew. He may have been exaggerating a bit, but I think he meant to say that everyone involved in preparing that dish and in serving it had worked in the rarefied air that surrounds the gods.
From the very first days I was put in charge of Harry’s Bar, I was constantly struck by how different I was from my father. For one thing, I have never been able to take things in at a glance the way he could. He seemed to see things from four different directions all at once, north, south, east, and west. I on the other hand was totally caught up lazily absorbing reality the way a sponge absorbs the water it is dropped in. But one thing I can say: I was never sorry to be working in Harry’s Bar. I cannot say that it was fun, I was never bored.
I managed to survive relatively intact the first weeks on my own. The only thing that sometimes upset psychophysical balance was the remark of longtime customers when they entered:
“Where’s Cipriani?”
I would timidly raise my hand, and they would continue: “No, not you. I mean Cipriani,” referring, of course, to my father. Someone else in my place might have tried to reserve a seat on a psychoanalyst’s couch to recount the first time he had been told how babies were born. But in my case, these bored refusals to acknowledge me as a human being left me indifferent. Indeed, these were precisely the remarks that stimulated me. I immediately wanted to win these people over. Perhaps helped by my youth — which is forgiven everything — and a bit by the good disposition of the customers as well, I often succeeded.
I remember one winter evening in particular. There were few people in the bar. I caned home near midnight. I always called to give my father a progress report: to tell him how things were going, how many customers had come in after he left, and how sales had been.
“How’s business?” he asked. These nightly conversations always began the same way.
“Not too bad.”
“How many meals did you serve?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Who did you have?”
“No one special. Except maybe Camillo della Noce.”
“Say hello to him, but be careful! Don’t even think of lending him any money.”
As I was soon to learn for myself, Harry’s Bar was full of people like Count Camillo della Noce. From the very beginning, a lot of my father’s customers were aristocrats, but in an age when aristocrats didn’t necessarily have a lot of money — often because they’d spent it all in hotels and restaurants, which is why they were so important for the restaurant business. Count della Noce was just such a nobleman. He was from an old Friuli family, he had a beautiful house in the country, rented a small apartment in Venice, and he knew just about everybody. Later he became good friends with Ernest Hemingway and with all of Hemingway’s friends as well. And like all good aristocrats, he had never worked a day in his life. Small wonder he was always broke. But he was a very charming man.
When I went to his table to give him my father’s regards, he immediately classified me among the people whose only concern was to make his life pleasurable. He thanked me for my father’s greeting and said: “By the way, Arrigo, would you bring me two hundred thousand lire in cash. I’ll give you a check later.” I did not have the nerve to object, partly because I thought that, after all, it was a matter of cashing a check, not making a loan.
About one in the morning, when all the other customers had gone home, the count stood up and came to the cash register.
“Do you have my money?”
“Yes, sir.” I handed him the money and waited for his check.
The count put the money in his pocket. He put his other hand in his other pocket and said: “Arrigo, I forgot my checkbook. I’ll pay you tomorrow.”
He was out the door at once, and I was dumbfounded.
That was almost forty years ago, when 200,000 lire were worth at least $1,000.
The only choice open to me at that moment was escape to America. What could I possibly say to my father, especially after what he had told me?
So, after ten minutes of terrible consternation and feverish brain racking, I decided to spend the night in pursuit of Count della Noce and the money. I looked for him at the Martini dance hall. No luck. I tried a couple of other places that kept late hours. Still no count. Finally fortune smiled. At about three o’clock in the morning, I found him at the Ciro Bar.
I asked the barman to call him. He greeted me with a noisy enthusiasm that palled as soon as I told him why I had come: I had given him the money from my own pocket, and the next morning I would have to answer for it to my father. So would he be so kind as to return the money at once?
The count fully understood my situation and my state of mind. He even tried to console me. “But, Arrigo,” he said, “I still have to make a call at the casino. Rest assured that tomorrow morning I’ll bring you your money.” He gave me a hearty pat on the back, and I found myself outside the bar, more disheartened and terrified than before.
But at that hour of night there was nothing left to do but go home. I tiptoed up to my room for fear of waking my father, who, I was sure, would immediately ask how things had gone with Count della Noce.
About five in the morning, as I tossed terrified in my bed, I decided to make another attempt. I knew that the count lived at the Hotel Luna, which is almost next door to Harry’s Bar, so I called the hotel. I pretended that I had an urgent need to speak with him, and the switchboard operator connected me with the room. A deep sleepy voice answered and asked who in the world was the pest who dared wake him at dawn, a time of the day the count was familiar with only from descriptions in books. I told him who I was, and he asked what in the world I wanted.
“Well, Count, it is about that money,” I replied. “You see, I really need to get it back.”
He did not seem to welcome my request. He blurted out something and then slammed down the receiver.
Still, I was encouraged by the partial success of actually reaching him by phone, so I tried again with the same story at six o’clock, and then again at seven, when I crept out of the house to avoid an encounter with my father.
By eight o’clock I was at Harry’s Bar supervising the cleaning. We usually open our doors about ten thirty. At nine o’clock the count appeared at the service entrance. As soon as he saw me, he pulled out a sheaf of banknotes and slammed them on the counter.
“Never again,” he thundered, “never again will I ask you for a loan. And now, if you please,” he added in a somewhat milder tone, “let me have a cup of coffee, and don’t expect me to pay for it, for heaven’s sake.”
He was a man of the world, a good man, intelligent and charming. He lived with his aged mother, who kept a very tight hold on the purse strings. And perhaps she knew what she was doing. When she finally died, he was not slow to follow her, burned out by the constant revelry he had spent his inheritance on.
He had a soft spot for me. But after that episode he never even thought of asking me for a cent; on the contrary, he was scrupulous about paying his checks. The only tab he left unpaid was his last one, for the simple reason that he had spent his entire inheritance. I was very sad to hear of his death, not because of his unpaid tab, of course, but because a representative of an important era had gone. He was one of the last real patricians that I was lucky enough to have known. A true gentleman, albeit with little money.
Count della Noce was not the only favored customer of Harry’s Bar whose pocketbook was leaner than his appetite. I remember that my old high-school teacher, Professor Alexander Vardaniga, found himself in a similar position toward the end of his life. He had made a terrible mistake when he retired by donating his enormous collection of books to the Church and was promised a modest pension in return. The Church kept the books but refused to pay him his pension, saying his library was not as valuable as he had claimed. After that, Professor Vardaniga couldn’t afford to eat at Harry’s Bar anymore, but he still came in for a light snack, and we always served him a full meal even when all he could pay for was the coffee. He had been such a good customer for so many years, how could we let him down?
Today, such stories are the stuff of memory. Money is money, and there’s no room for ambiguity in financial affairs. But we did not do business that way at Harry’s Bar. For my father, money was important to keep the business alive, and for no other reason than that. If I ever went to the trouble to add up all the tabs that were never paid at Harry’s Bar, it would probably go into the millions.
Fortunately, I’ve never gone to the trouble.