Summers in Supino

by Maria Coletta McLean

  “One of the prettiest restaurants I’ve ever seen,” said Bob. “And my business takes me into a lot of restaurants.”

  “I heard. You are the coffee man. How you like our Italian coffee?” he asked.

  “Better than ours.”

  “So,” Gary said, as he pulled out a chair. “May I? Your meal okay?”

  “Molto buono,” said Bob.

  “I have relatives in Toronto. I go every winter for a few months. They take me around to some places to try North American food. My cousin took me to a Toronto restaurant made to look like the inside of a ship — maybe you know it. I ordered a grilled trout. The waiter, he brings the fish on a plate and puts it in front of me. He doesn’t cut off the head. He doesn’t cut off the tail. He doesn’t take out the skeleton. He just leaves the knife for me to debone my own fish. Like I work for him. Did you have the trout?”

  “I did,” I replied. “It was delicious, but Bob doesn’t eat fish.”

  “I see. Come back tomorrow. I make you something special. Ey, Maurizio,” he called to the boy, followed by a string of quick Italian. In a few minutes, the boy was back with a silver tray holding a sweating bottle of limoncello and three frosty glasses. “I make a toast,” he said. “To your father.”

  In a darkened corner, an old man wearing a fedora opened up his accordion case. The accordion exhaled its preliminary sigh and the man began to play. I’d never heard the tune before. People leaned back in their chairs, heads dipped onto others’ shoulders, the waiter tucked his silver tray beneath his elbow and leaned on the doorway, and the woman paused from rolling her pizza dough. Stars poked through the dark Supino night sky, blinking here and there as if they recognized the haunting tune from decades past.

  “I love it here,” said Bob. I wasn’t sure if he meant the restaurant or the village. “I’ve been thinking Joe’s right. We should spend more time in Supino.”

  “Don’t you think you’d get a little restless after a couple of weeks?”

  “I’ve been thinking I could do something while we’re here. If we stayed for the summer, Joe said Bianca could use some help in the mornings at the Bar Italia. Her husband got a job driving the delivery truck for Lavazza, so he won’t be around in the day, and their son’s too young to be much help yet.”

  “What about when summer’s over?”

  “Joe says summer’s the busiest time for a bar in Supino. You know, the immigrants who come back to the village to visit their relatives and the people from Rome who have summer places here. In the winter, business is slower. It’s the opposite of the coffee business in Toronto, where our customers are busier in the winter months and things slow down in the summer.”

  “I don’t know, Bob, it wouldn’t be much of a vacation if you spent your time working.”

  “It would just be in the morning for a couple of hours. I like to get up early anyway, and making coffee and cappuccino isn’t really work. Plus I like to talk to people. It’s just a thought — something to consider.”

  “You don’t really speak Italian.”

  “I could pick up the words I need easily enough.”

  “You’re used to running your own business. Would you be okay to work for someone else?”

  “If I wasn’t, I could always buy a place and open my own bar.”

  I laughed. I thought he was kidding.

  On the days after the azalea show, routine returned to via condotto vecchio. Every morning, we’d wander down to the shops to buy our day’s supply of fruit, vegetables, and bread, and each day, our list of groceries grew shorter. No need to buy eggs when Joe left warm ones in a basket on our doorstep every morning. No need to buy fresh figs or plums or strawberries from the greengrocer because the neighbours brought them to the house by the basketful. No need to buy sausages because Alfredo, who lives around the corner and often joined us at the bar for our morning coffee, brought us jars of sausages preserved in olive oil. We could not reciprocate with fruits or vegetables because we had nothing growing in our tiny backyard except the plants that Joe’s brother Benito planted there.

  In the afternoons, it was very hot in our backyard. Good for Benito’s plants, but not so good for us. I thought that if we could plant a shade tree or construct an awning, it would provide relief from the sun and we’d be able to use the patio in the afternoons. I mentioned this to Joe.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “I’ll plant a grapevine. Grows very fast. Makes good shade.”

  The next day there was a cutting sitting on our cracked terrazzo patio. My cousin Guido saw it when he stopped by. Guido had spent a few years in Toronto in the ’50s before returning to Italy, where he and Liounna live in Rome during the winter but spend the summers in Supino. They have a little house on a small patch of land across the ravine. Guido brought some asparagus and leaf lettuce from his garden.

  As soon as we stepped onto the patio, Guido reached into his pocket for his penknife and sliced a fading rose from one of Benito’s rose bushes. “You have to prune these,” he said.

  “They’re not my roses,” I explained. “Benito takes care of the garden.”

  “Did you buy this?” asked Guido, fingering the grape cutting.

  “No, no,” I reassured him, “Joe brought it over to plant.”

  “If you allow your neighbour to plant on your land, the harvest belongs to the neighbour.”

  “The grapevine’s not for growing grapes,” I tried to explain. “It’s for shade. You see how sunny it is out here at this time of day.”

  “So I’ll bring you a cutting from my grapevine and you’ll be able to keep the grapes.”

  “I just want the shade.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Maria? You can’t eat shade.”

  I watched Guido walk from the back door of our house across the five metres to our front door, where he stopped and rummaged around in the tiny closet under the stairs. I raised my eyebrows at Bob; he turned up the palms of his hands.

  A few moments later, Guido returned with the beach umbrella Kathryn had bought at the market. The opened umbrella provided a small circle of shade. “Hold this,” he told Bob, as he pulled some twine from his pocket and tied the umbrella handle to the two-by-four post that marked the edge of our patio. “Next time, I’ll bring some nails.” Then, without warning, Guido picked up Joe’s grapevine and tossed it into the ravine. “See you on Sunday,” he said, putting on his cap and heading for the door.

  It wasn’t long before we had to explain the missing grapevine. The following morning, we heard several sharp whistles in our backyard that could only have come from Joe’s brother, Benito, who is deaf and communicates with hand gestures and whistles. Two minutes later, both Benito and Joe were in our yard.

  “Okay, okay,” we heard Joe say. I could imagine Joe patting Benito’s arm to calm him. “Bob,” he called up to the open bedroom window.

  Bob put his finger to his lips as we carefully lifted our bed from beneath the window and tiptoed it back to where Angela wanted us to keep it. “What should we say?” I whispered as we climbed down the stairs.

  Bob turned up the palms of his hands. “Guido was just trying to help,” said Bob as soon as we got to the backyard. “He tied this umbrella here to give some shade.”

  “Benito says someone pruned the rose bush.”

  “Guido didn’t know it was Benito’s job,” I said.

  “What the bloody hell is going on?” said Joe. “A man comes into someone else’s yard, Maria, and prunes his roses and throws his plants away and sticks up an umbrella that can only make shade for one person when a grapevine could shade the whole place.” Joe made an expansive sweep of his arm across our ten-foot-by-ten-foot patio. “Why you stick up for him?”

  “He’s my cousin.”

  “I forgot.” Joe made a motion to Benito, who responded with a series of gestures. “Benito says forget the grapevin
e. Since you want shade, he’ll make you something special with pipes and plastic sheets. He just needs some time to find everything.” Joe reached into his pocket for his penknife and approached the umbrella.

  “Let’s leave the umbrella here,” suggested Bob. “It’ll make some shade in the meantime.”

  “In the meantime,” Joe said, “you come to my house in the afternoon. It’s shady in my backyard.”

  The next morning we woke to the rumble of a truck on via condotto vecchio, accompanied by loud voices. We stood on our balcony and watched the city workers put up the wooden arches with lights that marked every festa. Two street sweepers working in unison to brush the cobblestones followed the city workers down the street. Usually Benito swept our street each morning, but today he stood in the doorway of Joe’s house, leaning on his own broom and watching. A small crew of painters, dressed in white jackets and hats, carrying buckets and brushes and long-handled rollers, followed the street sweepers.

  “It’s like a parade of workers,” I said to Bob. “And it’s not even eight o’clock yet.”

  The painters stopped and pulled out cigarettes and matches. The scent of tobacco joined the scent of coffee wafting from Angela’s kitchen window. Joe’s garage door opened, but when Joe saw the painters, he left the door open and came out to the street. He pointed to Benito’s broom and the street sweepers, joking that Benito was out of a job. Benito gave Joe a punch on the arm.

  In a few minutes, the street sweepers had reached the bottom of our street where it intersects with the road that goes up to Santa Nicola and the street that goes down to the Bar Italia. There’s a piazzetta, a little piazza, at that intersection in front of the water fountain that doesn’t work. Benito and the painters moved down to the piazzetta, and Benito sat on the bench to watch while the painters marked off five parking spots with white paint. Joe jumped in his car and swung left, heading up the hill away from the village.

  “All the roads closed today,” he called up to us. “San Cataldo.”

  My father had told me a few things about the Feast of San Cataldo. Schools were closed but the stores stayed open with extra stock for the festa. He said that people came from other villages to take part in the May 10th celebration. The day began with a sunrise Mass, and families arrived the night before, sleeping in the fields outside of Supino in order to be at the church on time. After the Mass, a group of red-robed men, including my grandfather, carried the statue of San Cataldo on a platform out to the piazza where the saint would spend the day in the spring sunshine and people would come to kiss his plaster feet and ask for favours or give thanks for favours granted. Dad was a little vague on the religious aspect of the feast, because for him it was more about the school holiday and the special foods his mother made for that day, as well as the fireworks at night. Dad said a few vendors set up tables on the main street selling things you couldn’t buy in the village: prosciutto cutters, goldfish swimming in bowls, budgies in bamboo cages, factory-made garden tools, copper pots, and, sometimes, if the travelling street vendors had reached Supino, exotic trinkets from Ethiopia. One year, my father said, there was even a fire-eater.

  For the rest of the day, wherever we walked, we passed workers cleaning and decorating the village. In the shops, the owners were busy stocking shelves and washing windows. At the store beside the jewellery shop, the owner hung skeins of brightly coloured embroidery threads in her front window and built pyramids with balls of wool. Inside, the butcher prepared a few dozen freshly plucked chickens for the grill outside. The baker set up extra bread racks to hold the extra loaves. The shoe-store ladies put three tables in front of their store with an assortment of shoes that had been in style 20 years earlier and a sign that read, “Speciale.” In the window of the postcard store, the woman removed her usual display of black-and-white postcards from the ’50s with their pinked edges and faded images, and replaced them with a stack of small white paper bags, a silver scoop, a scale, and an assortment of jars filled with penny candies. Outside the store window, a collection of children pointed excitedly at licorice cigars and sour keys and jawbreakers and lemon slices and red cinnamon lips and little waxy candies that looked like Coke bottles. Except for the hazelnut nougat and almond torrone that their parents made at Christmas time, candy was a rarity in the village. The only thing the shopkeepers didn’t have that day was time to chat. A quick “Buongiorno” was all we got as we passed.

  On the morning of the 10th, when we left the house as usual to head to Bar Italia, Bob had barely closed the front door before Angela called out her window, “Make sure you put all the locks.”

  On our street, we’d grown accustomed to the sounds of our neighbours’ doors. Joe’s garage opened with a whir; next door, Peppe’s opened in tinny increments, usually followed by the roar of Davide’s motorcycle. We recognized the sound of Sam’s truck and the distressed vehicles making their way up to Carlo the mechanic’s shop. In the same way, we knew the click of everyone’s front door, the swish of their window shutters, and even the sound of their friends’ voices as they stood on the street calling up to an open window. And our neighbours knew the metallic click of our front door key, the small scratch of the balcony shutter as it scraped on the marble floor when Kathryn opened it each morning, the purring engine of our rental car, and even the tap of our footsteps as we ran up and down the steps of number 10. Our front door locked automatically but you could add the deadlock with two twists of the key. We never bothered, but today we obeyed Angela’s instructions.

  A lot of unfamiliar cars were parked all along the street. We’d never been in the village for the annual San Cataldo feast and had no idea of the crowds that would arrive that day. There were so many people in the Bar Italia that Joe was helping behind the counter. As soon as he saw us, he motioned us outside and joined us in a couple of minutes with two espressos on a tray.

  “We usually have cappuccino in the morning,” I said.

  “No time for cappuccino today. Bob, you have any money?” At Bob’s nod, Joe continued, “Keep it in your pocket. Just bring out what you need. Small bills. Don’t let anyone see a roll. Count your change. Ask how much before you buy. Don’t pay what they ask. If they say, ‘Americano?’ you say, ‘No. Sono Supinese.’ Don’t speak English. Maria, you have any money?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  Joe put our empty cups on the tray and went back inside. As soon as we rounded the curve, where the shoe store sits in the middle of the street, everything became clear. The street was closed to traffic — we could not even see the traffic light for striped awnings and colourful canopies covering tables and carts of every size and featuring every possible item one could imagine. Cylindrical candles with images of Jesus or Mary or San Cataldo stood beside helium balloons featuring SpongeBob and Garfield. There were barrels of olives and tables of dried baccalà and baskets of lemons and taralli cookies threaded on wooden dowels and embroidered pillowcases and shovels and espresso cups and wicker baskets, and ladies’ underwear hanging everywhere.

  We had to elbow our way through the tunnel. The bakery, where we often bought a couple of slices of pizza, had a lineup stretching beyond the flower shop. Across the street the butcher was cooking sausages on one barbecue and spiedini on another; the barber from next door worked alongside the butcher cutting open the buns. A stranger, with a pushcart full of religious candles, stood on the other side of the butcher.

  “Butcher, baker, candlestick maker,” Bob said to me.

  The candle seller turned immediately. “Americano?” he asked, trying to put a candle in Bob’s hand. “Good price. Only five euro.”

  We shook our heads and kept walking. By the time we reached the top of the hill, where the three streets intersected, we’d been offered good prices on many things we didn’t want. As we looked down to the Kennedy Bar, all we could see was our main street stuffed with people, our sidewalks stuffed with vendors. Bes
ide us the piazza was filled with an art display of velvet paintings depicting Mary, Joseph, or Elvis.

  We slipped inside the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, but even here, an African vendor displayed his carved wooden animals on a cloth spread in front of the Holy Water font. A small boy stood guard by the front door, watching for the priest or police. A soft whistle and the vendor would fold the four corners of his cloth and they’d be out the side door. We sidestepped the vendor and went back outside, moving away from the crowd until we could go no further. Our backs pressed against the post office, which was closed of course, we watched the turbulent sea of strangers. Above the crowd, a pile of wicker baskets bobbed along. The baskets were followed by a bunch of whirring pinwheels and a long bamboo pole stacked with ginette cookies, Supino’s version of that North American invention, the doughnut.

  Some commotion erupted around the baskets, and the crowd pulled back a little to reveal a small man wearing a coolie hat and wheeling a pushcart loaded sky-high with baskets of every size and description. He was arguing with a woman who had set up a display of tablecloths, tea towels, and handkerchiefs all hung helter-skelter on a portable clothesline. Two clothespins held a sign announcing “100% cottone” but no price. The voices grew louder. The man waved a paper at the woman.

  “Is that a parking ticket?” I asked Bob, but before he could answer, I heard three sharp blasts from the policewoman’s whistle. One of the strangers in the crowd responded with a wolf whistle and that started another commotion. Before the policewoman could ask what the problem was, the man showed her his paper and pointed to the building. The woman said, “Casa mia. Casa mia.”

  “I think she lives in that house,” said Bob. “She’s married to the street cleaner.”

  “No,” said someone from the crowd. “To the postman.”

  “Who’s the man with the baskets?”

  “A foreigner. From Morolo.”

  Morolo was the village half a day’s walk away from Supino.