You swallow and swallow, trying to relax your throat through sheer effort. You stretch out your shoulders, hoping that this might help you breathe better.
She logs off the admin account and closes her laptop. She’s covered in goose bumps, she can feel extra heartbeats: it’s as if someone is blowing air directly into her skull, like her heart has been inflated to an unsustainable size, like her body isn’t whole but coming apart into many different components, each of them posing its own set of problems.
There are a couple of tourists in their forties, kind-looking Midwesterners in baseball caps, sitting next to her. She decides it’s not allergies and turns to them out of desperation: “Excuse me. I’m sorry, but I think I’m having a panic attack. I think I’m choking.”
“Oh dear,” says the woman and grabs her hand. An angel in dyed jeans and a fake YSL bag. Her hand is warm and soothing. The best plan is to return to Rome, since she’d already promised she’d come back soon to handle the bookstore’s yearly audit—reason enough. This is a sign. She leaves Lorenzo out of the explanation entirely. She has to find a way to reconnect with her father.
Outside in the open air, she begins to breathe again. She exchanges a few words with the middle-aged black man standing under the Mamma Mia! marquee, asking for charitable donations for a group that serves the homeless. Ludovica goes back to Berengo’s and opens Skype.
Her mother answers. She looks ten years older than the last time they spoke. Her cheekbones are identical to her daughter’s, but there’s something yellowed and waxy about her face. Her eyes are cratered, and her hairline seems to have receded, leaving a vast forehead above a shrunken face.
“Hi!” your mother says in her most cheerful tone. “I was on Skype, waiting for you.” Her face is so tiny, it’s as if it’s been curdled. Signs of active life—of bustling, adult life—are invisible.
“Fine, well, here I am. I’m alive. You’re not even going to ask me how I’m doing?”
That face—that yellow face framed by a chaos of flyers pinned on the cork board over the cashier’s stand. Late afternoon in Rome: your mom’s mood is distracted but good. “I’m freezing, love. We’re going to get some coso…”
“Un coso what?”
“Tea.”
“Don’t say coso.”
“But I want hot chocolate. We’re freezing. Fofi is warm, but I’m not.”
“And are you alive by the way?” La Sposina can’t stop. “I can’t believe you won’t just ask how I’m doing. Does whether or not I’m okay matter at all?”
“What’s this nonsense, you silly girl? I just asked if you were okay.”
“You didn’t ask, though. You just sent a text wondering if I was alive or not.”
“Will you stop it?”
“How’s Grandma?”
“Fine. She’s fine.”
Grandma had had a brain hemorrhage the previous week, after she’d suffered a stroke. So she’s fed up with talking to people. She’s scared and she’s ready. “There’s going to be a storm there tonight. Is Lorenzo at the university?”
“He is.”
“Good. Don’t go out tonight.”
“He’s fine. You want to know how he’s doing? How I’m doing?”
“You’re boring, Ludo, you know that?”
“Mom, you don’t care about me.”
“Stop it.”
“I think maybe I should come home and take care of the bookstore.” She watches her mother with tremendous concentration. “The three-month visa is expiring, so I was going to have to come back soon anyway…”
“I thought you were going to Toronto for that.”
“I’ve changed my mind. As soon as I find cheap tickets, I’m flying back so you won’t have an excuse not to visit your mother anymore. I’m taking you to see her.”
“You’re a pain in the neck.”
“Wouldn’t you be happy if I came back?”
“Of course I’d be happy.”
“Have you talked to Grandma today?”
“No. Is Lorenzo coming back too?”
“Is Grandma maybe dead? Like me? Will you ask her how she’s doing?”
“You know,” her mother responds without changing her expression, at once jolly and distant, “you can be so unkind. Stop this before you really hurt me.”
“You’re the one who’s forcing me to be like this! You’re not asking me how I’m doing!”
“Oh, really…Hey, Fofi!” (Ludovica winces as she hears the name.) Come here! Something’s wrong with Skype, Fofi, it’s not working, there’s a mosquito stuck in the screen!”
Fofi has heard the joke before and comes over. He’s the same as ever: curly hair, bright red beard, balding, fat but not obese, uptight, upbeat. “Ciao, bella. How are you?” Fofi asks Ludovica.
“Fofi, look, she’s neglecting her mother, the selfish little girl. I call her, I care. And she won’t even ask me how I’m doing.”
He has always wanted you without ever asking. You’ve never surrendered yourself, but he’s not without his skill set: he took your parents instead. He hugs your mother and kisses her on her head. He was the one who solved the problem with the distributors after you’d made that terrible deal with publishers to return unsold art books without charging them for shipping. When he hugs your mother, this old woman in need of affection, Fofi looks like a social worker: a model of charity in an ex-goth’s black sweater. You imagine, just then, what it would feel like to have Fofi hug you as an old woman. The second Fofi hugs that old head (your mother’s old head, but also your own) you feel your productive life—your allegedly meaningful adult life—evaporate. You see yourself in her: old, careless, unfathomable, unable to run the bookstore your husband bought for you as a pastime, compelled to entrust your duties to an ex-grad student because your son is a mystic and your daughter has dreams. Your mother’s fossil cheekbones can no longer testify to the presence of adult life and now neither can yours. You learned the word “adult” from your father, when you were five. “Films with real people in the flesh are for adults, and you’re a kid.” “What about Mom?” “Mom is an adult.” “What about Grandma? Is she an adult?” “Of course she is.” “No, Daddy, Grandma can’t be an adult; she’s old.” “Well just be sure not to tell her that; it’s rude.” Your mother’s robust back isn’t reacting to Fofi’s hug. You know that there are moments, hours, days when you are like her, when you are one and the same. You will become her unless you get what you want, unless life is arranged in some specific way. You don’t talk to anyone, you’ve forgotten your friends, and you only talk to people in your mind. Hugs no longer warm you. It can happen.
“Bye, Ludo. I’m going to see if I can make myself a hot chocolate. I think you look great. I think you’re doing fine, even though I had a feeling you weren’t when I texted you. Talk to Fofi. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I think you look great, too,” Fofi adds too quickly. And: “Bye, honey. When are you coming to rescue us?”
“Soon. Super soon, actually.”
“We miss you. I’d love to work on the audit with you.”
“Tell Dad not to worry. I’ll be back soon.”
“Alright, honey.”
“I’m hanging up. Ciao.”
“Don’t have too much fun.”
Ten minutes later Ludovica sends her dad a self-portrait from Times Square, Your square little girl. She has a feeling that after two months he will finally reply. He’ll have been updated with the news of her imminent surrender.
And he replies. “Hi, love, did you talk to Fofi about the audit?”
“Daddy, love, I’m coming back. We’ll work it out, promise.” She’s already in tears, clogged up with mucus, covering her face with a flimsy napkin, recycled brown paper ripping into little pieces.
“Try and be in touch with Fofi daily. Be good.”
“Love you, Pops.” Your throat tightens for a moment. You lower your head, join hands, weave them together, and wring them like two wet rags.
/> The purple cloud hasn’t lifted from your chest—you’ll need more than a few coughs to dislodge it—so you call your brother, who dispenses with you quickly. He doesn’t want to talk, and he doesn’t switch the camera on, because he can’t figure out how or he doesn’t want to, so he denies you the chance to see him stern and enervated, judgmental in his pinstriped shirt. Yet you succeed at making him feel judged without any visual aids: your determination not to ask him how theology is working out for him is conspicuous. His fellow students recite the Pater Noster before class, then talk Protagoras.
Now that you’ve dealt with the whole family, you find yourself deeply affected by a stray piece of news on repubblica.it: “This game-winning touchdown by a boy with Down syndrome has America in tears.” One of those little pieces of not-quite news on the right side of the homepage, the only column anyone clicks. You yourself give in to tears and hide your eyes behind the now-shredded napkin. You stalk Facebook for names and faces from yesterday’s party, you look up Berengo’s profile to check if he posted any pictures of you Lorenzo might see. Nothing.
—
A STROLL THROUGH a non-neighborhood. The area behind Times Square’s cardboard facades, Broadway’s backside. Fat white people, democratically nondescript; euphoric black high-school kids; mothers with big butts.
—
THE HOSPITALIZATION WAS part of Dad’s escape. Escape, heart attack, hospitalization: no explanation at all except for that time in the living room before dinner: “Let’s all thank God that Dad still has a job, and let’s thank our patient Mommy,” said mommy. This was ten years ago, and Ludo really didn’t want to make her father’s life any harder. Yet she’d left anyway. And they’re supposed to prepare the audit, which is sure to be a mess.
The store’s name, Librici, was La Sposina’s idea. After a few months in New York, she’s started feeling embarrassed by it, can’t bring herself to spell it when asked. She used to dress like a Parisienne—scarves, skirts, coats—but now that she’s a new woman in a new world of leggings and red wayfarers and aggressive bangs, that half-Italian, half-French name (libri + ici) really doesn’t fit. It’s possible that nobody besides her ever loved the French touch in the first place: employees and friends still pronounce it lee-bree-tchee. The store’s style is a bit outdated, too. Books are divided according to “whims” (“inner trips,” “discoveries,” “what’s cookin’,” “the cosmos and the divine,” “on a train,” and so on), and the menu features quiche and salads and muffins, a creation of a widow friend of Mother’s. Open until midnight, Librici is consistently deserted from eight on, except for those rare nights when friends conjure up some kind of activity: classical guitar concerts, poetry readings, and so on.
If Librici is a failure, Ludovica feels that some of the blame is hers. The industrious precision with which she approaches the viral marketing gig eludes her entirely when, on a long, slow winter afternoon, she has to decide how many copies of a particular novel to stock. During the day she and Fofi are both on bar duty, and she’s had one too many hugs behind the back—his plump, shy hand always landing in the same place: on her left hip, just above the curve of her butt—and her mother is sitting at the computer doing inventory with her usual mix of confusion and sloppiness. Moments like this—and their endless iterations—propel Ludovica into an unprecedented state of hallucinatory laziness. Her mistakes are serious but preventable. She has inherited more than a little bit of her mother’s allergy to the practical, yet the ambition is still there: she wants to do all the fancy things a bookseller does without first learning the basics. She has decided to buy books directly from the independents, in order to avoid the big distributors, but she’s careless and unpracticed: her experience with publishers consists of a year’s worth of editorial classes she took at proud indie minimum fax. But that wasn’t about tactile knowledge, anyway; she just wanted to find her way into the Roman scene. She made a deal with Sur for their South American fiction, but she forgot that she had promised to pay them up front. Fofi spots her screwups, but it’s usually too late, and anyway, he always tells Mr. Vozzi first.
The other category of mistake: she’s a compulsive buyer of art books. Before they opened, she insisted that a bourgeois neighborhood needed a place to buy expensive art books. (To Fofi, this has always been about projection rather than market strategy.) La Sposina went all the way to Paris for some Taschen special editions: she spent time in the Saint Germain shop and then had them sent over. Her dumbest whim: too often she takes off the shrink-wrap and puts the huge, excessive books on display. A few customers flip through, but that’s the point: once unwrapped, they’re impossible to sell.
And then there’s the €1,600 rent. They ended 2008 down €3,000, which happened to be the same amount her father “invested” to keep the books balanced. The following year, they lost €10,000, and Mr. Vozzi erased his wife and his daughter from the list of personnel and started settling with Ludovica directly, from his pocket to her wallet. It was awfully close to an allowance—the very transaction she had renounced since university. (The amount her brother receives each month is unknown to her—a secret among men.)
“How far are we willing to go?” Fofi asks with desperation and more than a hint of strategic thinking. “A €40,000 debt? You’ll go bankrupt with a bookstore full of books! It’s lost inventory, a fatal opportunity cost!” Mr. Vozzi only trusts Fofi now; he’s the only one who can talk the talk.
—
LIBRICI IS A structural mistake with a precedent: the restaurant the family opened in a small village in the Sabine Hills a decade earlier.
You were single, a student, and for two years you spent every weekend sacrificing your free time on behalf of the hills you called Sabinashire, a faux-ironic designation you secretly hoped would catch on, like Chiantishire. The second year you moved to the country and only came back to Rome during exams.
The restaurant your mother had in mind was as inessential to Sabinashire as Librici was to Quartiere Trieste. Even the more refined restaurants in the area offer big portions and aspire toward the easy pleasures: a full belly and a meal shared with family and friends. But her mother and her chef friend favored a different style: small portions, a pretentious menu seasoned with plenty of high-end, mass-cuisine slang, a misguided commitment to slowness.
It was then that her father had left home. His high school–aged son was studying for exams in Rome and was left alone, because his mother never left the countryside. The father’s escape lasted less than three weeks; he had a heart attack in Florence, where he was treated. He had been staying at a friend’s house; he was on vacation, trying to prevent a breakdown, meeting a lover, or some combination of the three. And so, neither La Sposina nor her brother Fausto saw their father in the hospital. Ludovica, who was hurt by her father’s escape, stayed in the countryside, and Fausto was ordered to join her there. Mother spent some time alone with father. They decided that they couldn’t live apart, so the restaurant was shut down. Mother fell out with her partner, who found herself jobless due to the tumult. (She eventually recovered and now works for a catering company.)
Ludovica took it all in stride. Months earlier, she had discovered that the restaurant had a bad reputation. A man who worked on her neighbors’ vineyard mistook her for a family friend visiting from Rome and told her he had had dinner at the Vozzi restaurant the night before. The country air made you hungry, in his opinion, but the Vozzis’ place “won’t fill you up, and it’s not as if these flavors are, you know, exceptional. It’s not like it’s some kind of culinary experience…” He was a rough man: he’d lost his thumb in a plow accident and had a history of premature deaths in the family, so he didn’t mince words about someone else’s tragedies. The ingredients weren’t as good as they should have been: the tiramisù scomposto, in vogue at the time, was served with whipped cream that didn’t taste fresh or homemade, and the pieces of marinated zucchini were hard and rubbery and didn’t have that true zucchini smell.
An
d now it’s the new generation of Vozzis who are overseeing the big mistakes.
Now that you’ve reconnected with your father, you spend the afternoon trading emails that are frank but not hostile.
“You promised,” Father writes, “that you’d be back in three months, that you’d spend a month here, then three more over there, then back here for good to run the bookstore. Is that still the plan?”
“I don’t remember promising that, Dad, but if the priorities are different now, that’s fine. I’ll look up flights today.”
—
CUGINO HITLER IS back at Berengo’s in a checked shirt, and so is his fifty-year-old friend, as well as one of the two patronizing girls from the bedroom and the two Brescians in tight silvery clothes, whose nearly identical hairless faces are lined with dark shadows, neorealist horrors barely concealed by the thin film of an elusive cultural élite. Yes, she’ll go back to Rome and find a place behind the counter right where her mother was sitting just a few hours ago, where she sits every day and responds “yes, Fofetto, of course” to every command Fofi issues. A few months ago, it was this reality—the outlook of more of the same—that gave her the cue to escape. It would feel like giving up now, sure. But it would also feel like a relief.
It starts snowing around eight, and as they arrive, the guests pull off their snow-dusted jackets and coats, which soon begin to drip. Berengo has placed a red plastic shower mat under the hangers, and everyone has an in-joke ready. Somebody quotes the Coen brothers: “The mat ties the room together.” A friend of Cugino Hitler’s, in falsetto: “Don’t forget to bring a towel.” Counts and cocottes in the salon, they were born to nod to western memes and old-fashioned references. Tonight they fear a snowpocalypse: “We’ll all sleep together, Nicolone.” The projector is set up, someone calls in an order for Japanese food, a group in the kitchen tries to figure out how to make fudge. That’s when La Sposina finds out, via a laptop on the counter, that Nicola’s girlfriend hosts a cooking show on TV, and that all the males in the house pine for her. She’s not here tonight, only on YouTube, and toward the end of the episode, they begin to make jokes as she pours fudge onto the ice cream and smears her upper lip with caramel and whipped cream as she eats. She must have a father, too, and he must also ration his emails to her, keeping her heart between his fingertips like dough, forming it into a tiny pale ball he idly rolls around the tablecloth for obscure reasons. Or maybe she doesn’t, and that’s why she’s licking fudge off her lips as the whole world watches.
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