ONE VERY MUGGY SUMMER DAY in the late 1960s, I went to see my father in his home in the Valsugana Mountains near Trento, where in his later years he sometimes took a month’s vacation. I had been running Harry’s Bar for a little over ten years, and, in theory at least, my father was no longer involved in the day-today business of the bar he had founded in 1931 and built up to the legendary Venice restaurant it had become. Of course, until the day he died, my father would never accept that he was no longer in charge of Harry’s Bar — and a good thing it was, too. My father was Harry’s Bar. Had he ever really broken all connections with the restaurant, he would have ceased to exist. After he “retired” from managing Harry’s Bar, he still came every day for lunch and was always our most demanding customer — the one we tried most to please, and the one who was most sparing with his approval. But a good word from him meant more than all the lavish praise we got from our real customers.
I didn’t arrive at Trento until the afternoon, later than I had planned. My father came toward me with that slightly hurried step of his, and he could not refrain from scolding me for my tardiness. I expected that, of course. In the twenty years I ran Harry’s Bar while he was alive, I don’t think I was late for work a single time. Getting to work by ten o’clock in the morning and again at six for the evening meal was like a law of nature in our family, and I’m sure that if anyone had ever asked me I would have said that the world would end if I ever arrived for work as much as a minute late. Today, I sometimes think that the strict adherence to a daily routine that I learned from my father, as useful as it is, ruined my taste for discipline forever. For example, soon after he died, I developed an immediate distaste for getting to appointments on time, even for scheduling appointments at all, and it’s an aversion that has never left me.
That summer day, my father greeted me heartily, then hurried off to the warmest room in the house to see if the Krapfen dough was rising. As everyone in the family knew, fritters had always been my favorite sweet. A moment later he reappeared disgruntled, because the dough had risen too much. As usual, he asked how business had been going while he was away, but this time he did not pay much attention to what I said. He was clearly following his own train of thought elsewhere. We were sitting on the shady side of the house, on a terrace overlooking the meadow, and he suddenly started to talk about Germany, where he had spent his childhood, and about German lieder. And then he started to sing, softly. The lied spoke of an exile’s nostalgia for his home in Spain and his all-consuming longing to return.
It was then I discovered a side to my father I had never seen before, and I was glad, because only our family knows how little of it we saw when he was alive. Never had he told me in any explicit way whether I lived up to the expectations he had for the heir to the family business. But on that summer afternoon, I began to realize that I knew him more from what he did over the course of his life than from what he said.
Many of the episodes described in the first part of this book, as told by my father, were events I witnessed too; others he told me about; and still others are part of our family heritage — Mama Giulia, my mother, told them to the three of us when we were children. We listened eagerly, as children do to old stories about the grown-ups, as she told them in the evening, while we were alone, and he was at work.