THE SORT OF THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN NEW YORK
BY THIS TIME I HAD GOTTEN TO KNOW NEW YORK almost as well as I knew Venice. From the start, I was taken by the energy and the personableness of New York, and I lent no credence to what I thought was its slanderous reputation as a dirty pit of vipers, with murderers and terrorists lurking around every corner. At first, I tried to be on my guard at all times, but my meditative nature soon got the better of me. This led me into some unexpected situations — all of which ultimately confirmed my opinion of New York as the most amazing metropolis outside of the Veneto.
About one o’clock in the morning one summer Saturday, I went to get a quart of milk in one of those little New York stores that is open twenty-four hours a day, and I was approached by a shabbily dressed, very agitated black man with a happy-go-lucky face.
He waved his arms about wildly as he spoke. “Do me a favor, mister. My wife just took the Rolls and ran off with the chauffeur, and I haven’t got the cash to get my Ferrari out of the parking lot. Give me a hand. I don’t know what to do.”
I was so astonished by his brilliant but unlikely story that, almost without realizing it, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a dollar a moment before the two very worried Thai clerks started weakly urging him out the door.
“Hey, hey!” he protested. “Don’t you want my money? Nothing to buy here? This is good money!” And waving the dollar bill, he tried to resist. Meanwhile he kept winking in my direction until he was pushed outside.
I was still smiling as I took my quart of milk and stepped out to the street. He was still there. “Hey, mister!” he shouted. “You shouldn’t buy anything in that store. They’re so violent. There’s too much violence. Too much violence, that’s the trouble.”
He went off down Third Avenue talking and waving his arms.
But after many years of frequent stays in the city, I still don’t share his fear of violence. I often walk home from the restaurant at night. I don’t live far away, maybe fifteen minutes at a leisurely pace, and I like walking. I have never witnessed any violence, nor have I ever sensed violence in the air. Quite the contrary. One evening my thoughts were elsewhere as I walked along, and I didn’t see that I was headed straight at a man on the corner. He started waving his arms and shouting as I approached, “No, no!” I realized that for an instant he was afraid I was going to mug him. I was sorry to have frightened him, but I confess that I was also rather amused.
I sometimes wonder if there is more violence or more fear in New York. You can certainly feel uneasy in the presence of madness. At night, and especially in the summer, there are more male ghosts on the street than in other cities — sleeping ghosts, piles of rags with a man underneath. Or maybe a woman. Hopeless melancholy prisoners of the very street where they live. These harmless derelicts, almost always numb with liquor or drugs, frighten people. People are frightened to look at them, maybe frightened to understand them.
In the daytime, however, a lot of madmen save themselves from wisdom through outspoken disrespectful humor that is usually aimed at the powers that be. We used to have madmen in Venice too. For years there was a man who used to stand on the outer ramp of the Rialto Bridge in the evening. He would tunelessly scrape the strings of a rickety old guitar. No logical sound came out of it. Just to tease him, we children called him Segovia. “Let’s hear it, Segovia,” we would say. “Play us something.” And he would laugh.
Then there was Adele, who always alternated invective with friendliness. Mario, the Number Man, could go on and on reciting increasingly gigantic numbers. Young Alfredo Oro, alias Pacéa, would walk along and every now and then suddenly emit a short hoarse shout. Eugenio was short of breath and couldn’t carry a tune, but he held a page ripped out of an old music book against his cheek and sang. And then there is the nice, awful, and highly intelligent Praitano, who has fun terrifying passersby and people in bars with his looks and gestures.
Of course, New York has its own remarkable collection of eccentrics.
Louis Hanson is a Jamaican, and every evening at seven o’clock he sets up his street piano right outside our front door. He places an upturned cardboard box top on the pavement next to his instrument and looks around with a smile behind his graying mustache. His skin still preserves the Jamaican sun and rain after fifteen years in New York.
Every evening he plays the same song over and over again, very slowly picking out the hesitant keys with one finger. Those simple notes that seem to float above the deafening roar of Broadway strike me as unreal Louis Hanson plays “Stardust” and smiles at everyone who gives him something: “God bless you,” he calls after them as they head downtown. “You are a wonderful human being.”
And every evening around eight o’clock I put a dollar in his pocket. And the restaurant is always miraculously full of people.
Then there was the suitcase incident.
It was sitting on the street in front of one of the two big windows looking out over Central Park. There was something a bit sinister about it sitting all alone in the middle of the wide pavement on Fifth Avenue. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. No one had noticed who put it or left it there. It was just past noon when the maître d’ told me. “There’s a suitcase outside the door,” he said with that indifferent air Italian immigrants often acquire in America, as if it were no concern of his.
I went out at once to have a look. You couldn’t help but notice it. It was a great big ugly old suitcase, and very dirty. It was made of colored cloth with a wide band of blue plastic down the middle. The zipper must have been forced shut, because the suitcase was packed full and heavy. No one dared to touch it. No one uttered the word “bomb,” but that is what everyone thought it was. At least it looked more like a bomb than a suitcase. As soon as I saw it, I felt ill at ease. Everything else seemed to lose its usual liveliness, because that suitcase was so strangely immobile. I realized that I felt better looking at it straight on than when I turned my back. The minute I turned away, the skin under my hair started itching in a peculiar way. That must be what people mean when they talk about your hair standing on end.
The police arrived at twelve thirty, six cars with sirens off but yellow and white lights blinking on top. They drew up to the curb. A dozen policemen got out and stood in groups of three about fifty feet from the suitcase. I approached one group and asked if someone would be coming down to defuse it. They said the bomb squad was on its way, but the traffic was heavy and it would take them a while to get there.
I went back inside. The restaurant was full of people, but no one realized what was happening. Outside even passersby, whom the police did not try to stop, turned to give the suitcase an absent glance and continued on their way. Inside, two beautiful women sitting next to the window asked me what all the police were doing. I explained that there was a suitcase, and they asked to be moved to a table in the rear, away from the street. I moved them. Meanwhile more time passed, and still nothing happened. As I circulated among the tables, I wondered what would happen if the bomb went off. For a moment I could see it all in slow motion: the picture windows shattered into a million incandescent particles bursting through the dining room like a violent gust of wind, spreading panic and death.
It was a few minutes to one o’clock, and it occurred to me that if terrorists had put a timing device in the suitcase, they surely would have set it precisely for the hour. I went downstairs to the kitchen on the excuse that I had to speak to the cooks, but I came right back up, ashamed of myself for leaving my customers at the time of the explosion.
It was five minutes past one when I went back out to the street: I wanted to feel that strange sensation in my scalp again, and the closer I got to the suitcase the more my scalp tickled. My son was inside the door of the hotel next door, protected by a solid wall of jambs and doorposts, smiling and talking to the hotel manager. My son Giuseppe is very young and certainly wasn’t ready to die so soon.
The policemen seemed to be getting nervous, and they all eyed the bomb. It was about one thirty when another police car pulled up. A man in uniform got out, calmly went up to the suitcase, and knelt down beside it. He took a very sharp little knife and cut a round hole in the fabric. He pointed his flashlight and looked warily inside the suitcase. He delicately drew out a rag and put it on the pavement next to him, and then another and several more after that. Soon there was a pile of rags on the sidewalk on one side of the policeman and a deflated suitcase on the other. Then he stood up, got into his car, and went off. And immediately the other policemen all left too. A cleaning man came out of the hotel with a broom and dustpan to sweep up the useless remains of the suitcase.
One afternoon a couple of days later, I was standing in the middle of the packed restaurant when an odd smell almost unconsciously turned my nose in the air. I sniffed and noticed that the maître d’ and the waiters were doing the same thing. I looked out the big window to see what was happening on Fifth Avenue and heard the sound of a parade. It was then that I realized the smell we had all noticed came from the hot-dog wagon parked outside our restaurant. We all laughed.
On days like this Fifth Avenue is full of people. There are so many people on the street, it looks as if the natural order of things might be upset. Manhattan is an assemblage of people and traffic lights, and the traffic lights are there to regulate the people. Except that when so many people are out walking, the street corners seem swamped by a tender and impatient violence. The automobiles always win but not by much.
I went outside and was immediately enveloped by the festive blare of trumpets and drums. I don’t know what parade it was, one of the many that begin down toward Forty-sixth Street and come up Fifth Avenue along Central Park as far as Ninetieth Street. It might have been the Irish or the Chinese who were parading, or the Italians or the bicyclists. Not that it matters, they’re all alike. On the other side of the pointless barriers the police hurriedly erect in the morning, there are usually a great many vibrant majorette legs, groups of very serious pathetic war veterans, various bands playing to a vaguely martial beat, and, always, a sweet and noisy atmosphere like a rural festa in Italy.
That is how it was that morning, too. I smiled at the hot-dog man, and casually mentioned that at least half of the sweetish blue effluvium of his wursts was coming into the restaurant. He responded with an understanding smile, one colleague to another. He pushed the electric button of his pushcart and moved it a few yards up the wide pavement in the direction of the parade. Soon the windswept smoke was cheerily profaning the august foyer of the Hotel Pierre.
Then there is of course New York’s underworld, the world of the subway and the deafening sound of steel as the trains run underground. It still fascinates me. People on the subway seem numb and resigned, but occasionally a miracle happens. The other day, I was hanging on a metal strap, and I thought I heard a child’s light singsong voice. I turned and saw a black woman slowly advancing from the other end of the car. She was very fat and wore a long threadbare purple dress down to her feet. The hollows of her blind eyes stared lifelessly up into infinite darkness.
She held a very long thin white cane in one hand, her left one, and she tapped it lightly from side to side. She held a little tin cup, like a milk pot, between two fingers of her right hand. She moved slowly but always kept her incredible balance on the storm-tossed floor of the car. Meanwhile she was singing. It wasn’t even a song, just a tuneless hum in a very faint voice, but a voice that was clear and slender, as slender as a silk thread that might suddenly snap.
It was only when she was very close that I could hear the words and recognize the song that repeated ad infinitum: “Baby my love … baby my love.” And as she walked on, setting one foot down after the other with the calm of ages past, the miracle happened. All the men and women in the car put a coin in the woman’s cup. They did it very carefully and almost furtively so as not to disturb her progress or interrupt the song, which she was still repeating when I got off the train at my stop. And for a long time afterward the words continued in my head, “Baby my love … baby my love.”