American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  “Piada dei morti?”

  “Yes,” I say. Bread of the dead. They only make it in the fall, for the day and month of the dead. “My wife loves it.”

  “Bones?”

  Yes, the baker tossed in a couple of cookies too, called bones of the dead. I rattle the package again. I’m ready to walk. “See you around, Enzo.”

  “Buona giornata,” he says.

  38

  What’s New

  And then there is the hairdo. At some point during our time in Italy, we drive thirty minutes down the coast to Pesaro, where my wife goes to Marcello for shampoo, color, and cut. (I think that is the order of operations.) Unlike Serravalle, with its plodding small-town civility, and unlike Rimini, with its grubby charm, Roman footprints, and jarring internationalism (hello, Russians), Pesaro is fashionable, homogeneous, and a little bit smug. At Marcello they don’t make appointments. My wife walks in. They take her coat. She gives herself to two hours of luxury.

  This time it’s a late weekday afternoon. After dropping her off, I walk in the direction of the Via del Corso.

  Probably every old city in Italy has a Via del Corso. Without Google-translating it, I’d just call it Main Street, a principal artery through the city center, often with limited or no auto traffic. In Pesaro the Corso is a fashion runway. An occasional van crawls up or down the gently sloping brick street, making deliveries. Patient residents inch toward home in their cars. Mostly, though, it is well-dressed people on foot or on bikes.

  I stop at a place called Bar Iris, hoping to find a Wi-Fi connection. I have the first chapter of Louis Begley’s Shipwreck on my Kindle. If it’s engaging, and if there’s Internet, I’ll download the rest of the novel for later. Served an espresso and a shot of water (water first—order of operations), I ask about a connection.

  “No Wi-Fi,” the young woman says. Her hair is tied back in a bun. She has a tattoo necklace.

  “Anywhere around here?” I ask.

  “All blocked.” She mimes turning a key in lock. “You need the password.”

  In that case, I tell her, I will have a glass of wine and then, considering it will be a long hair appointment, probably another glass of wine. I position myself so I can read and watch people walk by the bar. In short order I make a startling discovery.

  Sweatpants.

  Not just an occasional man who has drifted into sartorial error and foolishly ventured into public. No, I witness blue and gray sweatpants on many men, young and old.

  This is odd for two reasons. I think it’s safe to say the United States invented sweatpants. Usually a fashion trend moves from Italy to the U.S., not the other way around. Years ago my wife and I ran into a young woman at the airport in Rome. She was flying to the United States. She was someone connected to someone we knew in Pesaro, exceedingly well turned out, and wearing one of women’s fashion’s greatest gaffes: stirrup pants. It was summer. The pants were snow white. She looked like a model of a vintage skier prepared for photo ops on the slopes. It took a year or so, but eventually stirrup pants caught on in the U.S., where they lasted a long, long time. The other reason, of course, is the astonishing sight of a Pesarese dressed down, way down. I would have expected sweatpants in Pesaro to be like pornography in Kabul: indicative of a fatal cultural breakdown, a character flaw someone could indulge only at home, doors locked, shades pulled.

  For years, arriving in Pesaro, the first stop my wife and I would make was Amadeus, a boutique run by her cousin Nano and his wife Marisa. We stood on the floor just inside the door and exchanged kisses and news. Eventually Nano, conscious that we were smack in front of the big display windows, would move us away from the front of the store. “Go over there,” he’d say with an impish smile. “If paying customers see you two in here, you’ll drive away business.” Then they would fix us up with some new clothes, my wife a lot, me just a little. One year Marisa slipped a double-breasted linen blazer on me. It was the color of sand, sabbia in Italian. “Nice,” she said, tugging and straightening the jacket on me. “See how good you look? On you the sabbia is very beautiful.” In truth, it felt a little crooked. I bought it anyway, feeling like I ought to make an effort. I took it home and waited five years to wear it. (Buy it, wait a while, and then wear it—order of operations.) She was right. It was beautiful. Maybe it’s a Methodist fear of fashion. I just can’t dress like an Italian.

  Except for the scarf. I’m not afraid to scarf up.

  My second glass of wine arrives just as a couple enters the bar, pulling their dog behind them. They sit at the table next to mine. It’s warm in the bar, but they don’t bother pulling off their scarves. I turn back to my Kindle. The narrator in this Begley novel, an American named North, is seated in a bar called L’Entre Deux Mondes. His story begins in Paris, circa 2003. When a waitress approaches him, Begley’s narrator muses, “I have to admit that altogether I like the new kind of French. I like their healthy looks. So different from the sallow kids I knew when I was a kid myself, with their passion for politics and their yellow teeth that melted in plain sight as they drank their scotch.”

  Outside, a parade of pedestrians passes, many walking with arms linked, most wearing scarves. It’s a week since the terrorist attack in Paris. I wonder about the new French that Begley mentions. I think of my Arab students back home in Dearborn, standing by the door outside my classroom, laughing, hugging each other, being innocent girls. Conscious of their politically charged appearance—how can they not be?—they call themselves “scarfies” in perfect English and laugh the stigma away. They laugh; still, there is an undercurrent of fear. After 9/11 I worried about them, feared for their safety, knowing that, seeing their scarves and long dresses, an angry American might lash out: take revenge first, ask questions later. Order of operations.

  The couple sitting next to me drinks tea. Their pooch, a dead ringer for the old RCA dog, seems happy to have a seat. I listen for conversation, straining to hear the dog’s name. My niece tells me her friends like to give their dogs English names: Scott, Lizzie, Susie, Brad. This one is Spillo (SPEE-lo), which is the Italian word for a small, pointy object; the English translation is “pin.” Walking past their table with a tray under her arm, the woman with the tattoo necklace leans down and tells the dog how good, how well behaved, how handsome he is, to which the dog responds with one crisp, preemptory bark.

  They get up to leave around the time my phone rings. My wife is ready. I’m supposed to meet her at Amadeus.

  “Let’s go, Spillo,” the man says. “Come on!” He pulls on the leash, but the dog won’t budge. “Su! Andiamo.” He pulls at the dog again, charmed by its intransigence. It’s no go. I wrap my scarf around my neck and watch as he bends down and picks up the dog. Tucked under his arm, it asserts itself with one more piercing, sovereign bark.

  Outside I merge with traffic. It’s getting cold. I’m glad to have the scarf.

  39

  Small Beans

  It’s the little things that divide us.

  My wife and I disagree on toilet paper orientation, whether the lap falls next to the wall (her way) or away from the wall (my way). When I take bread out of the fridge and give the wire tie a counterclockwise twist to open the bag, if the tie tightens, I know who closed it last. I feel a wave of dissonance, a visceral feeling of imbalance. It’s like stepping onto an escalator that’s not moving.

  We disagree on how to load flatware into the dishwasher. My system is rational—forks on the left, knives on the right, spoons in the front and rear of the basket. Loaded like this, it’s a delight to empty a dishwasher. She doesn’t see it this way. “The spoons and forks nest,” she says, giving me a look of gentle disapproval. “They don’t get clean.” She arranges flatware in a messy jumble. The way she loads, it takes twice as long to empty the basket. I won’t have anything to do with it.

  Then there are beans. We’ve had bean problems for years.

  Her beans, I admit, are good.

  We’re in the hills above the Adriatic, a
few miles inland, and just now dusk is bluing the meadows and vineyards that slope down to town. It’s summertime, so all the windows in the trattoria are open. Like most Italian hill towns, this one has a fortress. The structure dates roughly to the year 1000; it was rebuilt in 1300. There’s also a church and a few narrow picturesque streets and some shaggy trees in full leaf, all part of the breathtaking normal of this region. We’re here, sixteen of us at the table, for the tagliatelle and beans.

  These tagliatelle, what we would call fettuccine in the United States, are homemade, the pasta cut (tagliata) into ribbons, served with beans ladled over them. Maria, the proprietor, says it’s quite simple: beans; carrots, celery, and onion; slices of cotechino, which is a sausage of pork and lard wrapped in pig skin; olive oil and conserva (tomato paste); salt and pepper and water. In three hours you get a soup cooked far enough beyond soup to make a beany, velvety brown sauce.

  When the server lays four steaming platters on our table, all conversations stop. A breeze billows through white curtains. We regard these dishes with a combination of adoration and lust. Then someone says, “Chi vuole?” Who wants some?

  Who knew beans could be so good?

  Next day my wife says to her mother, “Guess what we had last night.” Without waiting for her mother to answer, she launches into a description.

  Mother waves a dismissive hand. “I know,” she says. “We had that all the time when I was a kid.”

  “You did? But why didn’t we?”

  “Because it’s peasant food,” she says. “It’s what we ate because we didn’t have much money.”

  That’s beans for you.

  When I was growing up, a couple of times a month we sat down to a dinner of beans: a pot of navy beans boiled long and low, seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked far enough beyond soup to make a thick, savory, beanful broth. My father, a child of the Great Depression, called this dish “soupy beans.” The navies grew at the edge of the farm town where he was raised and, thirty years later, at the edge of a different farm town where I was raised. They grew in forty- to eighty-acre fields—long, luxurious seas of green next to sections of corn and beets and soybeans.

  We ate soupy beans ladled over bread. It’s what they ate back then, he explained, because they didn’t have much money. Beans were necessary. And delicious.

  Our Michigan navy beans are delicious.

  Trouble surfaced when I came home from Italy one year with beans on my mind. Tuscans are called mangia fagioli, bean eaters. Wherever you go in Florence, you find fagioli all’uccelletto, beans cooked in the style of small game birds. This means garlic, sage, olive oil, and tomato. For all of a month after that trip, two or three days a week I cooked beans all’uccelletto. It was a fine madness.

  “Enough with the beans,” my daughter finally said.

  My son agreed.

  “They’re good,” my wife said, “but not with those navy beans.”

  Those navy beans?

  “But I love my navy beans,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Cannellini would be better.”

  Perhaps the recipe called for cannellini. But to insist seemed pedantic. And cannellini, I thought, when you bought them, who knew where they came from, how long they’d been sitting on store shelves? Whereas my beans came from my hometown. They were fresh. They could probably be dated to the exact time of their consignment, maybe even traced to a specific farmer and field (Vern Stephen, the corner of Hotchkiss and Garfield Roads). It was then I began to notice my wife’s resistance to my beans. While I looked lovingly upon their blond goodness, she ate and shrugged them okay.

  Just okay.

  Beans are not a neutral food.

  Thoreau was a bean farmer. “I came to love my rows, my beans,” he writes in Walden. “They attached me to the earth.” He rhapsodizes about beans, about farming:

  This was my curious labor all summer—to make this portion of the earth’s surface which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on.

  Having grown up around bean fields and admired the plants’ broad leaves, having driven country roads outside of town on warm July evenings and gazed down long rows of bean plants vibrating with color and vitality, I understand Thoreau’s rhapsody. He was determined to know beans.

  But Thoreau, that dope, did not eat them. So how could he truly know them?

  He describes himself as a Pythagorean. These days, if we know Pythagoras, we know him for his theorem, a2 + b2 = c2. Tenth grade geometry, right triangles, let c = the hypotenuse. But Pythagoras is also known for this famous maxim: don’t eat beans.

  The record, it should be noted, is not crystal clear. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes Aristoxenus—a student of Aristotle, who was himself a great admirer of Pythagoras—claiming in 300 BC, “[Pythagoras] valued it most of all vegetables, since it was digestible and laxative.” On the other hand, it appears Pythagoras bought into all manner of superstition associated with beans. Don’t eat beans—they look like genitals. Don’t eat beans—they resemble the doors of Hades; their stems connect this world to the underworld. Souls, which are essentially wind in that worldview, could be reincarnated through the bean plant, and thus to walk upon beans was to trample souls. It gets weirder. A chewed bean spat on the ground and warmed by the sun was believed to smell like semen or spilled blood. Weirder still was the belief that a bean blossom placed in a container and then buried would grow into a human head, and thus to eat beans was tantamount to eating your parents’ heads and therefore a form of cannibalism.

  Beans and the dead: it’s a connection that survives to this day. On All Souls’ Day, Italians remember the dead solemnly, if gluttonously, by eating almond cookies called fave dei morti, beans of the dead, or sometimes, because of their shape, ossi dei morti, bones of the dead.

  In fact, it was the fava bean that bugged Pythagoras. The blossom has a black spot on it, and this perceived defect was enough provocation for Pythagoras to change the menu. Not me. I’ll strip fava beans out of their pods, blanch them, tear off their jackets, and eat them raw, avid for their rich green color, their firm sweetness. It’s a lot of work for a handful of beans, but when they’re tossed with extra virgin olive oil and served with shaved Parmigiano or pecorino, it’s a job I’ll sign up for.

  Saturday mornings at the local market north of Detroit, we buy Swiss chard and eggplant from Korean farmers. For a few weeks in midsummer they have cranberry beans, what the Italians call borlotti, still in their pods.

  “These are good,” my wife says. “You might try these all’uccelletto.” I hear her underline these.

  But I’ve come to my senses. Every bean has its place. And she’s come to her senses, developing a newfound appreciation of the navy bean. On such mornings, fresh from the market, we sit at the kitchen table and shuck beans. It’s slow going. It’s bean work. It’s a job our parents would have done hundreds of times.

  I lift a handful of borlotti. They are creamy white with red speckles. After a few hours in the pan they are brown, bigger than navy beans, undeniably delicious.

  “Why not,” I say. I can swallow my reservations. They go down easy as beans. “Let’s try them.”

  40

  American English, Italian Chocolate

  One September day in 1975 I was sitting in a classroom in North Carolina when a woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder. I was new to the school. I’d talked to a few classmates, but not enough, I thought, for anyone to know me. It was my first experience in the South.

  “Wisconsin?” she said.

  “What?”

  She smiled and said, “You talk funny.”

  I told her she was close. How did she know?

  It was the midwestern nasal, she said. It gave me away.

&nb
sp; This was a course in American literature. In the weeks ahead I remember a classmate from Mississippi talking about the poet Hart Crane. “He was fixin’ to write a modernist epic,” she said. In another class, a student from Worchester, Massachusetts, said he looked forward to re-reading “The Hot of Dockness.”

  “Or as you would say,” he paused and twisted his mouth sideways, forcing himself to make the r sounds, “The HeART of DARKness.”

  On December 21, 2013, the New York Times published a piece called “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk.” By the time I got to Facebook around 7:00 a.m. that day, there were already multiple links to the article (technically not an article but something called a “news interactive”). It must have lit up the Twittersphere. In the eleven remaining days of the year, “How Ya’ll” generated more hits on the Times website than any other article (or news interactive) in 2013.

  When I went to the Times site and checked out “How Y’all,” I found a twenty-five-question quiz based on a Harvard dialect survey developed in 2002. Did I say “you guys” or “youse” or “yins”? Did I say “cougar,” “puma,” or “mountain screamer”? “Kitty corner” or “kitty wampus”? “Lightning bug” or “peenie wallie”? How did I pronounce the word “aunt”?

  According to the survey, I was from Grand Rapids or Detroit. Or somewhere thereabouts. That’s me. I’m nasal, and I’m proud. We love our local lingo.

  One of my favorite skits on Saturday Night Live in the past few years is “The Californians,” a goofy takeoff of daytime soap opera that lampoons Cal-speak. It features a bunch of suntanned So-Cal nitwits who delight in gossiping and giving each other driving directions. Best of all is Fred Armisen’s California accent when he greets his nemesis. “Stuart?” he says. “What are you doing here?” But it sounds like, “Whhrryouooingere?” Consonants completely slid over, vowels stretching and gliding into each other. He doesn’t speak the sentence. His mouth extrudes it.