Chapter Text
Working at Trattoria da Pia doesn’t pay much, which is why you’ve learnt to be grateful for tips and for the leftover focaccia they let you take home in foil.
It’s a family place, the kind with six tables inside, four on the pavement whenever the sun shines, and a laminated menu that hasn’t changed since before you were born. Pia runs it like a ship. She’s nearly seventy, she’s five foot one, and she has never once raised her voice, no matter the rush. Her brother does the kitchen, her granddaughter Giulia does the bar, and you do everything in between: tables, dishes, and sometimes she lets you write the specials on the chalkboard in nice, cursive handwriting. In true Italian fashion, it opens from 12 PM to 3 PM and then from 7 PM to whenever the clientele leaves.
You’ve been in Italy for just over three months. You’d like to say it’s going well.
Your Italian is good enough to take an order and not good enough to follow an argument about the order that could happen afterwards. Your flat is above a grocery shop: one room, one gas ring, a window that looks out onto a wall and, if you lean, a slice of sea. You tell everyone back home it’s so beautiful, and it is.
It’s better than the life you had at home. You’re not dealing with your stupid father nor your mother who likes to pin the blame on you for everything that’s ever happened. It’s truly the taste of freedom you’ve always longed for. And living in Italy, like this, lets you be closer to the dreams you hold. You want to work in heritage and restoration and once you know the language well enough you’ll look for any opportunities to grab.
But, for now, you’re content being a simple waitress and you’re happy to work for Pia.
There’s many regulars in the trattoria. Mr Neumann is one of them. He started coming in around the middle of September, and now he sits at the table by the window more days than not, at 1 o’clock, with a cup of tea. Sometimes he comes in the evenings instead for a glass of something stronger. He brings a book, sometimes a notebook with a fountain pen that he caps and uncaps while he thinks. He reads, or writes, or looks out at the sea. He’s retired, apparently, or on sabbatical, or maybe on holiday, the story changes depending on who’s telling it.
In every way that matters to a waitress, he’s perfect. He never complains. He never waves. He never snaps his fingers or asks for the bill before you’re ready to bring it. And he tips in cash, always a little too much, always folded in half like a note being passed in secret.
And you may or may not have a small, tiny crush on him. Well, he looks good for someone who could possibly be retired.
Stop being weird, you tell yourself, as you look away from him to wipe down tables. It isn’t too busy, but he’s here with a glass of scotch. You’re too young for him, you remind yourself, as you deal with the other few people having drinks of their own at tables inside and out.
You’re locking up tonight. Pia went home early with a pain in her knee. Her brother cleared the kitchen a little while ago. And Giulia asked you nicely if she could go home only a little earlier since she didn’t get enough sleep. So it seems that, tonight, there’s no one to tell you non da sola.
Pia has opinions about the road by the church. A tourist broke his wrist there last month, and a couple from Stuttgart had a bag snatched the month before that, and the lamps have been out for as long as anyone can remember because the mayor has been promising to fix them since the last election. Non da sola, she tells you most nights, while you’re pulling on your jacket. Not alone. You say it’s only ten minutes. You say it every night, and every night Giulia, or Pia’s brother, or somebody ends up walking you to the end of the road.
You do the last of the closing before you let yourself have a cigarette. The chairs are up on the table, the till was counted twice, the shutters on the front windows pulled down and padlocked and every light is off except the one over the bar that Pia likes left burning. Mr Neumann and the last table had paid a little while ago. You have his too hefty tip folded in one of your pockets.
So now it’s just you, and the back door, and the alleyway that cuts across the rear of the building, where you have your cigarettes because Pia disapproves of smoke near the front.
It’s colder than you planned for. You were in such a rush this morning that you ran out of your flat without pulling anything over your shirt, and you let the exercise warm you up. You hadn’t counted on being the one to lock up. The October air off the sea is damp and salty, and you hate it a little and love it a little. Before you had moved here, you thought Italy was eternally warm. Now, you know better.
You lean against the plastered wall and cup your lighter and light up. The first drag is the best thing that’s happened to you since lunch. The keys are heavy in your apron pocket. You’ve only got to lock the back door behind you and you can go-
“You told me you were cutting down on those.”
You jump hard enough that the back of your head knocks the wall.
It’s his smooth, subtle voice. There’s no bite in the statement, just some soft curiosity laced into it. He’s never loud, nor overbearing.
He’s at the mouth of the alley, where it opens onto the lane, a tall dark shape against the one working streetlamp. You’d assumed he’d gone home a while ago. Is this the quickest way for him to go uphill to his villa? You had heard it’s somewhere further up, one of the big old houses with the nice gardens. It occurs to you, vaguely, that he must come this way most nights, and you’ve just never been out here at the same time.
You hide the cigarette behind your back like an idiot, like you’re fifteen again. He watches you do it and says nothing.
He comes towards you, unhurried, in the long coat that always makes him look like he’s walked out of a film older than you are. You wonder why he’s still out here. Perhaps he stopped to look at the water. People do that here, you’ve noticed. It’s what the sea is for, you’ve done it time and time again too. Back home, it was a two hour drive to get to the coast to enjoy the same views you can have everyday over here.
“I said I’d think about it.”
“So you did.” he stops at an appropriate distance in front of you, “I don’t think I need to tell you that it’s bad for you, you’ve seen what the packet says.”
Il fumo- Il fumo causa-
You can’t exactly remember the words.
“Are you not cold in just that shirt?” His eyes dip down, for a mere moment.
“No, no, I’m fine,” you say and your teeth choose that exact moment to chatter. The cold bites to the bone. You regret not putting on a jacket or a jumper.
“You are shaking, signorina.”
Signorina. You let the word sit for a second longer than you should. It’s what he’s called you since the second week, when you spilled a carafe of red down his sleeve and he said careful, signorina, with the faintest curl to the word, and you laughed, mostly out of relief that he wasn’t angry.
Mr Neumann unwinds the scarf from his neck. He doesn’t ask. He simply loops it around you, the way you imagine someone would for a kid being sent off to school, and his knuckles graze the underside of your jaw. The wool is still warm from his neck.
It lasts less than two seconds. You count them without meaning to.
Okay, you think. That’s what dads do. Presumably. Don’t make it weird.
You really shouldn’t be thinking about his knuckles or his hands.
“Do you want me to walk you home? It is quite dark.”
“It’s a ten minute walk,” you offer a sheepish smile, “Just by the church. I’ll be alright.”
“The lamps on the road by the church are broken.” He states it simply, no further explanation needed to get his point across. It’s exactly what Pia would say. It’s exactly what Pia has said, nightly, for three months.
“I... uh, I don’t want to burden you...”
“Nonsense.” He offers his arm and you stare at it, “Indulge an older man.”
“You’re not old.” You say it too quickly, too earnestly, and you want to put the words back in your mouth.
“I am forty-seven,” he says, with that dry, patient amusement, “That’s kind of you, but it is inaccurate.”
You drop the cigarette and put it out under your heel. Okay. You’ll indulge him.
You lock the back door behind you, the key stiff in the old lock. You don’t take the arm, and he doesn’t seem to expect you to. You walk side by side, a careful foot apart. It’s prim and it’s proper.
For the first few minutes you don’t talk. You can hear every footstep. His are unhurried, to match yours. Yours are a little too quick. You take small breaths, as though you could keep your nerves quiet by making less noise. Every few seconds you’re sure you should be saying something and you can’t think what.
“How long have you been in Italy?” he asks, eventually.
“Three months. Just over.”
“And before that?”
“England. It’s a long story, and not a very good one.”
He doesn’t ask for it. You’d braced for him to, and it’s unexpectedly kind, the way he simply nods and lets it lie.
“My Italian is terrible,” you offer, to fill the gap.
“It is improving.”
“You’ve noticed?”
“I hear you take orders every day. You used to call everyone tu.” A very faint curl at the corner of his mouth, “You have stopped. And your accent is getting better.”
You laugh, startled. You hadn’t known anyone was listening that closely. It should feel strange, being noticed in such detail. Instead, your face goes warm and you’re glad it’s dark.
The church comes up on your left, black against a blacker sky. The lamps are dead, as promised. In the niche beside the door, the little Madonna stands in her chipped blue mantle, with her own lamp that’s been out since before you arrived. You’ve passed her every night for two months without looking at her once.
“Someone should see to that.” he says, of the lamp.
“The mayor?”
“Yes. I am sure the mayor is on his way.”
It makes you laugh again, a bit too loud in the quiet, and you realise you’ve stopped shivering. The scarf, which is mildly too big on you, has done a lot of work. You decide it’s the scarf and not his presence.
You get to the end of the road and walk just a little further, to your place. Your building is the one above the grocery shop. He stops at the curb and does not come any closer.
“Goodnight, signorina.”
“Goodnight, Mr Neumann. Thank you. Really.”
“It was no trouble.”
You let yourself in, and climb the stairs, and by the time you reach your door you’re already telling yourself it was only manners. He waits on the pavement until the light in your window comes on. You stand behind the curtain with your nose pressed into the scarf, which smells of cedar-scented cologne, and you decide firmly that this is all perfectly normal. You tell yourself it’s normal three more times before you fall asleep.
***
Thursday evenings are for Italian.
It started as a favour. You’d mentioned in passing, while pouring his tea, that your residency interview was coming up. You keep practice sheets folded in your apron to go over between customers, and one afternoon he glanced at the one sticking out of your pocket and made a noise like a man watching someone butcher a painting.
He offered to help. You said no. He said very well, in a voice that suggested the matter was closed, and went back to his things. Then Pia, who misses nothing, caught your elbow at the bar and said vai, vai, ti serve, and that was that. Now it’s the end of November. He’s been coming to the trattoria for two and a half months, and for the last four Thursdays you’ve been walking up this hill after your shift.
The villa is twenty minutes from your flat and uphill the whole way. It sits at the end of a lane just past the last streetlamp, where the town gives up and the oleander and olive trees begin: pale stucco gone the colour of weak tea, shutters that were green once and have faded to something between grey and blue, an iron gate that sticks unless you lift it. You love it.
The town is small enough that you’re told about its owner and how Mr Neumann pays in cash for it. You don’t care about that. The owner is a retired dentist in Turin who lets it furnished, which means the sitting room is full of someone else’s life. Lace doilies. A crucifix over the door. A sofa that sags in the middle like a hammock. No, what you do think about is that Mr Neumann’s own things are almost nothing by comparison: a stack of books, the notebook, a good coat on a peg. It looks like a hotel room somebody is trying very hard to leave no mark on.
The kitchen is the only room that feels lived in. The terracotta floor is worn into shallow dips in front of the stove. There are copper pans, a long scarred table, and a window over the sink that looks straight down at the roofs and the sea. It smells of dust and age.
It turns out he’s a good teacher. From one foreigner to another, he can explain grammatical cases and rules that Italians just inherently know and cannot explain. He also speaks Russian and German. The German you could have guessed, by his surname alone, you think. He hasn’t told you much about his past.
But it’s become a ritual. His kitchen table, a plate of something he’s cooked that you’re not allowed to leave unfinished, and sheets of paper covered in his slanted handwriting. He never eats with you. He sits across the table with his tea and watches you finish, and in the first week it embarrassed you, and now you’ve stopped noticing, which, if you thought about it for longer than a second, might be weird of you. You don’t think about it.
“Again,” he says, “Vorrei rinnovare il mio permesso di soggiorno.”
“Vorrei rinnovare il mio permesso di soggiorno.”
“Slow down. It won’t bite.”
“It might.”
“It will not.” He taps the page, “Once more.”
You take a breath. You say it slowly, rolling the r the way he’s been showing you for weeks, and when you look up he’s watching your mouth with a look so brief you almost decide you imagined it.
“Brava.”
Your face goes hot, all at once. It’s a word they say to children and dogs. For a child who has sat quietly, and for a dog who’s learnt a new command. He’s said it in the same low, warm tone he’d use for either of them, and it lands somewhere it shouldn’t.
No. You’re making it weird again. Brava is simply what you say to praise a young woman. Stop it.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Nothing! Nothing. Just warm in here.”
“The window is open.”
“Yes. Well. I’m warm.”
He looks at you a moment longer, then lets it go. He’s good at that, letting things go, you’ve noticed. He stands to take your plate and, passing behind your chair, presses his palm flat between your shoulder blades.
“You are slouching.”
You straighten like a puppet on a string. His hand stays there for one second. Two. You find yourself counting again.
“Mr Neumann,” you hear yourself say, and you have no idea where the next part is going to come from - maybe it’s the fluster, maybe it’s to ignore your own thoughts, “why are you helping me?”
The hand leaves. You hear the plate set down in the sink, the tap runs.
“Because you need it.” The tap shuts off. He sounds exactly like himself, even and amused, “That’s all, signorina. Finish your sentences.”
It’s the right answer. It’s the kind, sensible, fatherly answer.
He asks if you would like for him to walk you home. You tell him he doesn’t have to do that for you this time. You want to be alone with your thoughts and you think he lets you have it with only the smallest pause and objection. You tell him you’ll be okay and that he’s already doing too much for you. He tells you that he’ll take you to the bottom of the hill and there’s no room to argue.
You speak briefly during the walk, whatever comes to your mind and more gratitude for the lessons. You say your goodbyes.
You leave in the dark, and the whole way back to your home you scold yourself. You’ve made it weird. He has been nothing but kind to you and you made it weird. Your cheeks burn in the cold air.
You take the unlucky road by the church, if only because you feel like you deserve to be unlucky for all your thoughts. You pass the church without looking at the Madonna. Her lamp is still out. You walk a little faster than you need to, and in your head you rehearse an apology you’re never going to say.
***
It’s a busy Thursday night at the trattoria. The oven went out at half past six. Pia's brother cursed and shouted and tried many different ways to get it working again. A table of eight Austrians sent back everything, politely, in two languages, and on your way past the bar you dropped a tray of glasses. Six glasses full of champagne. Giulia said non importa and handed you a dustpan, and then you stood in the stockroom for ninety seconds with your forehead against a shelf of tinned tomatoes, telling yourself you were just checking the stock.
By nine thirty you've served forty-one covers, been called la ragazza twelve times and la cameriera inglese twice, and your feet have stopped feeling like feet. All you want is your bed.
You go up the hill anyway.
That's the ridiculous part. The residency came through last week, faster than anyone told you it would: a stamp, and a laminated card with a photo that makes you look like a hostage, valid for a year. You don't need the lessons now. You'd planned to say so tonight. Thank you so much, I think I'm all set. You had even practised it. And then you took off your apron at nine and your legs turned left before the church and carried you up the lane and you lifted the iron gate.
He hasn't suggested stopping either. When you showed him the card he said congratulazioni and held it for a long time, turned it over once, and handed it back with something that looked almost like regret. Then he put out a fresh sheet of paper. The imperfect, he said, you will need it.
Pia asked where you go early on Thursday nights, and you reminded her about the Italian practice with Mr Neumann, and she looked at you over her glasses for a long moment and said, “Con il professore.” With the professor.
It wasn't a question. It's what everyone calls him at the trattoria. It stuck, the way things stick in small towns, and somewhere in the last two months it quietly stopped being a joke and turned into a small title he's earned. Il professore. The small town has approved of this man who no one is sure of whether he’s here for retirement, tourism or something else.
But tonight, he takes one look at you in the doorway and puts the tenses away, “Something easier,” he says, and makes you repeat the words for what's on his table, il pane, il coltello, il sale, while you eat a bowl of risotto in about four minutes. He watches you finish. You ask him to teach you words involving the town: vecchie strade, lampade rotte, le ripariazioni.
At quarter to ten he stands.
“Put your shoes on. I will find my coat.”
He doesn't ask anymore, you realise. No more do you want me to walk you home nor at least to the bottom of the hill. He just says it, and you just do it, and neither of you has said a word about the fact that this is now how it works. You carry your bag through to the sitting room and sit on the edge of the sofa with your shoes on and your laces double-knotted, ready to go. You can hear him upstairs, the floorboards above creaking. Any moment now he'll come back and you'll stand up and be perfectly civil and he'll walk you at least as far as the church.
You only mean to close your eyes for a minute.
The worksheet has gone blurry anyway, and his sofa is too soft, and the lamp is warm. The doily under your head smells faintly of something comforting. The crucifix over the door has stopped being a crucifix and become a dark shape, and the clock ticks, and ticks.
You wake to the click of the shade being turned down. Then your shoes. First one, then the other, unlaced and set side by side on the floor. He lifts your legs gently onto the couch. Finally the weight of a blanket settling over your legs.
You keep your eyes shut. You don't know why. It would be easy to say sorry, I dozed off. Instead you let your breathing even out, as if you've practised.
He doesn't leave.
You can hear him, a few steps away, not moving. The clock ticks. He's checking that you're asleep, you tell yourself. That's what people do. It goes on for longer than it should. Long enough that you feel it, like a draught on your face and your hair and the hand curled under your cheek. You count and stop counting at thirty.
Then a floorboard, a breath, one very quiet sentence in a language you don't recognise. Not German, not Russian, not Italian, the only three you've ever heard him use. Soft, almost careful.
The click of the door. The steps creaking under his weight.
You don't open your eyes for a long time. Opening them means deciding what that was. Opening them means deciding whether it’s your fault for making it weird again.
And then, absurdly, you fall asleep.
You wake to stripes of light.
They come in through the shutters, thin and gold, and for a few seconds you have no idea where you are. The ceiling is wrong. The smell is wrong, the cedar invades your nostrils instead of damp and the gas ring. The cushion under your cheek is lumpy. Then it arrives all at once: the sofa, the sitting room, his villa.
You sit up so fast the blanket slides off your legs. It's a grey wool one you've never seen, tucked in at the edges like somebody made up a bed with you in it. Your shoes are on the floor by the sofa leg, side by side, laces tucked neatly inside. Your bag is on the table. Your phone is on top of your bag, face up, as if it had been put somewhere you'd see it.
8:52. Three messages from Giulia.
tutto ok??
Pia says il professore TELEPHONED her last night to say you fell asleep
she says you're not to come in before 18. i would like details
You put your face in your hands.
He telephoned Pia. A man rang your employer at ten o'clock at night to inform her that you were safely unconscious on his sofa, and by now the whole trattoria knows, and at six o’clock you are going to have to walk in there and look at the table by the window with every single person in the room knowing exactly where you spent the night.
Nothing happened, you tell the inside of your palms. Nothing happened. You slept on a sofa. In a blanket. In your shoes. Well, not in your shoes. He took them off for you.
“Good morning, signorina.”
He's in the doorway in shirtsleeves with a cup in each hand and a look of such perfect composure that you study him for evidence. There's none. He looks exactly the way he always looks, which is like a man who's slept eight hours in a well-made bed. It's what bothers you most.
“I'm so sorry,” you gabble, “I only meant to shut my eyes for a minute, I don't know how- what time is-”
“Twenty to eleven.”
“Oh my God. Pia-”
“Knows. I telephoned in the evening in case you had work tomorrow. She asked whether you had eaten. I told her you had. She seemed satisfied.” He puts a cup down beside you. Tea, the way you take it whenever you’re here. “She also says you are not to come in before six. She was quite firm.”
You stare at him, “You rang Pia.”
“It seemed polite.” A very small pause, “I did not think you would want her to worry.”
And it's exactly what you'd have wanted. It's exactly what a good person does. It's also, somehow, the most intimate thing any man has ever done for you, and you can't think why but you do know it’s pathetic of you.
“You could have woken me up.”
“I could have.” he agrees and doesn't say why he didn't.
There's bread on the table, probably still warm, in paper from the baker at the bottom of the lane, and a jar of apricot jam you've never seen him open. He's already been out. You try to picture it: him in his long coat in the grey light, queuing behind the old women for bread. You can't. You don’t believe he’d do that for you.
“Eat something before you go.”
“I'm not-”
“Signorina.”
You eat something. The apricot jam is really nice. He knows you like sweet things. It works well with the fresh bread. You don’t talk. You’re scared of saying something stupid.
You go back to the sitting room for your things. When you fold the blanket, because you can’t tell yourself not to, it smells of his scarf you still haven’t given back, and the edges are creased where they were tucked under the cushions.
You don't think about the hands who tucked you in so carefully. You decide he doesn't need to know you were awake when he took off your shoes. You decide it several times as you put the folded blanket back down on the sofa.
“I will walk you down.” he says.
“It's daylight.”
“Then it will be a pleasant walk.”