Polly's Guide to Italian Men

I am sharing writing every day in February -- including failed fiction attempts! This is a bit from a short story (maybe a long short story) I'd begun that I tentatively called "Polly's Guide to Italian Men." The narrator is an American girl living in Italy who's met a lot of Italian men. Maybe too many.

Fiction is hard and so I've put this aside. But I do think about Polly sometimes.

*

Chapter 1: How I Met Beppe

How I met Beppe isn’t something I can pinpoint without trawling back through months and months of fruitless, painfully awkward encounters with Italian men in Pisa. And knowing him now as I do, there’s nothing about him that immediately attracts one’s attention. For starters, he isn't much to look at (but don’t tell him that. Or tell him -- he won’t believe you either way). And for the record, he’s also not an intellectual powerhouse (information, again, that has been withheld from him, somehow).

All I know is that by the time my final weeks in Pisa approached, he and I had fallen into the habit of meeting up in the early afternoons as he went about his errands. By then, we were so comfortable with each other that we’d developed a kind of bickering call-and-response in our conversations. It was really just one long conversation about men and women. 

One day -- it could be almost any day of our acquaintance -- we wandered over to the post office in the early afternoon so he could retrieve a package (sent by -- wait for it -- his mother). 

Somehow he was chiding me about what Americans eat; conversations with Beppe had a way of winding around to some criticism he had so who can say how that day we came to be discussing the suspect eating habits of my native country? I played along for a while. In fact, with Beppe, I often had to pretend I didn't know what I knew. You could resist, but well, the rules of the game make themselves felt, whether you follow them or not. The rules of the game with types like Beppe.

It’s subtle. Beppe wasn’t ever going to say, “Play dumb,” or “It’s all about me,” or “Let me be right about everything, even if you have to pretend to the point of biting your tongue off.” No one ever does. Yet the expectation was there, hovering between us, wherever we were. In the case of the day in question, as we stood on line at the post office. 

I remember the postal clerk cradling the phone to his ear, trying to track it down in Pisa’s mammoth central post office. He was another type. I don’t have time to go into much detail but put it this way: In America, a similar chore means: Wait in line, retrieve package. In Italy, it seems to entail negotiations and idle speculation. The postman may even make a vague moral proclamation on the contents of the package you’re trying to send (like Fabio at the bank who with some suspicion in his voice said I lived at a “fancy” address). 

As Beppe and I tried to interpret the clerk’s face behind the service window, he announced, “It’s food. I know it. Or I will know it, if this tizio ever finds my package.”

“You mean, like chocolate chip cookies?” I imagined biting into one, fresh from the oven. “That’s the kind of thing my mom would send me.”

“Macché? Have you ever had Quarta coffee? Or orecchiette? Don’t answer.” He pressed his hands together in a prayer gesture Italians often use that has nothing to do with prayer. “The answer is no. Because no one cooks real Italian food here.”

Then he made a clucking sound, which like many nonverbal sounds in Italy had a specific verbal import.

“What’s wrong with the food in Pisa?”

“Oddio,” he replied, “it’s fine for people like you, Madeleine.”

“What do you mean people like me?” I injected the phrase with all the weariness I could summon from my 21 years on Earth. 

“Oh, you know.” He moved his hand in circles, stirring the air like cake batter. “People who eat hot dogs, and ruin something wonderful like pizza with pineapples.”

I smirked. “You mean Americans.”

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