Mine was a simple life: the gym, my morning run, a swim, the restaurant. My new motorbike, the odd night out, heart-to-hearts with Matteo in the evening, a woman once in a while, riding my bicycle after dark past the Imperial Forums or along the old Appian Way and the feeling that this, in itself, makes me a very lucky guy indeed.
What I remember of that night is the birthday party I hadn’t been invited to and a smiling girl from the Veneto region with a trace of D minor in the pitch of her voice that revealed a melancholy side that all the smiles in the world could not entirely conceal. I remember her words crushed between the walls of the venue and, later, in the darkness of the night. I don’t remember what she was wearing, there was nothing special about her clothes, but those eyes were too beautiful for anything else to matter. She spoke to me about her work in the infectious diseases unit of a hospital in Rome, and about Africa. I told her that the birthday girl’s tiramisù was shit. Then I went looking for her at the address she’d given me, but she wasn’t there and I thought I’d never see her again.
Instead she found me. She came to dinner at the restaurant on Via Veneto with a girlfriend. Her sense of direction was nonexistent (the name of the street she told me she lived on was wrong), but she had a good memory and plenty of initiative. She’d never been with a man she later despised, which in itself was a good enough reason to fall in love with her.
Her name was Giuliana. She had long shapely legs and the most beautiful breasts I had ever seen, and she was very shy. She said that statistically love did not exist, and I agreed with her. She said that spending €100 on a meal was insulting, and I did not agree with her. We continued to meet after I finished dinner service at the restaurant, and both of us regarded those nights as thumbing our noses at statistics. She made me listen to rapper Ascanio Celestini’s “L’amore stupisce” (Love Surprises). Love hits you and you don’t know why, loves pollutes like a Chinese multinational. Love isn’t, no it isn’t possible, the song goes, in the fragile world of flowers. I made her listen to “E statte zitta” (Just Shut Up) by the Roman singer-songwriter Alessandro Mannarino. Love, yeah right, the clothes will dry by themselves and this chill doesn’t come from outside, it comes from inside of me.
Then she won a residency at a hospital in Bologna and I decided to follow her there. I left the restaurant on Via Veneto and filled my backpack. I had no control over the life and moods of this woman, so it didn’t worry me that I didn’t have any control over my own life either. Anyway, I landed a job pretty much as soon as I got there, and all was good with the world.
Nearly a year went by, and although Giuliana always wore black, she turned my life upside down with those eyes and the thoughts hidden behind them. When she took me to meet her mother in Thiene and then to dinner at a nearby restaurant, I ate one of the best pizzas I’d ever had and stopped to have a few words with the owner of the restaurant. He needed a chef. Giuliana’s residency in Bologna was coming to an end and she was moving to Asiago. I looked at the map. Thiene was only twenty miles from Asiago, so I made an appointment for an interview and soon after started my new life in the Veneto region.
Learning to master yeast seemed like a good idea at the time.