Cappuccino Carla
“Pronto,” was the first word that Emily heard after she had dialed the number for the school in Florence. Emily didn’t speak Italian, but she knew Pronto not only meant “quick,” but was also used as a greeting when answering the phone. Emily, you see, was trying to reach her boyfriend, Brett. He was living in Florence, but she was stuck in London taking a theatre class that she didn’t particularly like, but she knew she had to complete because it cost a lot of money. She would never admit that the class was boring and that she had no intention of ever acting, so she couldn’t even explain why she had enrolled in the course.
Emily didn’t like to think she was excelling in the bad idea department these days, but since she had arrived, it appeared that if anyone graded her decisions lately, they probably would have given her a D. Her first bad decision, when she arrived in London, was to try and find someone who could split the cost of an apartment with her. She had met another woman in her theatre class who was looking for a roommate too, but after a single 15-minute conversation with her, Emily realized that they had absolutely nothing in common.
The second bad decision (based on the outcome of the first one) was to just find an apartment by herself. This led to the third bad decision. She found a small flat in a nice neighborhood, but it was over her budget. Because of this lack of funds, she didn’t have much of a social life, other than the occasional pint at a pub. Still, she made sure that she put some money aside every week so she could at least have train fare to visit Brett in Florence. She knew once she arrived, he would pay for a hotel room, and they could definitely share the cost of some meals. Emily knew that food prices were cheaper in Florence than in London, and besides, how much could pizza and a glass of wine cost anyway?
The minute Emily thought about pizza, she started to think about all the pasta she was looking forward to eating, too. Particularly spaghetti carbonara, or maybe even ravioli swimming in butter and sage. Emily started to get really hungry thinking of these dishes, so she tried to put them out of her head. Consequently, the first thing Emily needed to do was to leave a message for Brett and let him know what train she’d be on later in the week. And in order to do so, she had to somehow use the house phone in the flat she was renting. This, however, was a slight problem since the landlady didn’t want her to use the phone because phone calls were expensive. Normally, if Emily wanted to call Brett, she’d go to the post office and use a phone there in a private booth. But she was too lazy that morning to go outside, so she found herself staring at the phone in the living room. This phone had a tiny lock on the rotary part of the phone, so even if there was an emergency, she wouldn’t have been able to dial a number. Emily touched the top of the lock thinking maybe it wasn’t locked at all, maybe it was just there as a deterrent. Emily jiggled the lock to see if it would just pop open. However, that wasn’t the case. The lock was definitely locked, and the rotary dial part wouldn’t budge. Why she thought it would be easy to remove the lock, she had no idea, but she figured she’d at least give it a try.
Emily stared at the phone a little while longer and realized she needed something to pick the lock with. But what? The end of a ballpoint pen? A toothpick? A pair of tweezers? She tried a pen first and it didn’t work. She knew she didn’t have any toothpicks. But she did have a pair of tweezers in her make-up bag. So, she went to get the bag and looked inside. The tweezers she had were short and fat and wouldn’t fit in the lock. Then she found an old barrette. She forgot she had thrown it in the bag in case it was a hot day, and she needed to put her hair up. She had never mastered the art of transforming her unruly hair into a pretty French bun though, so the barrette was never used.
She took the barrette out of the bag and opened it. She realized that the metal end of the barrette was very thin, so she stuck the end of the barrette into the lock, and it fit perfectly. She suddenly looked around the room, thinking someone might be watching her. This was a stupid reaction on her part since she lived alone. Who would possibly see her doing something that her landlady had expressly forbidden? She finagled the barrette until the lock turned, and she was able to pull it out of the rotary hole and dial the number to the school. And that’s when she heard Carla’s voice say “Pronto.”
Brett had written to her about Carla in his last letter. “Probably early 40’s, divorced, has pictures of her son on her desk, and likes to flirt with the other male professors. Also makes a big deal about having her cappuccino in the morning, and you can’t ask her anything until the cup is empty.”
Emily wondered if she had finished her cappuccino already so that her message would be conveyed in a timely manner, and not just written on a pink message pad and then never put in Brett’s mailbox.
“Pronto Carla,” Emily said. Followed by “Buongiorno,” hoping her voice sounded friendly.
“It’s Miss Emily, correct?” Carla asked her.
Emily nodded and wondered why she did that. It wasn’t like Carla could see her through the phone. Emily realized that she must have been leaving too many messages for Brett since Carla recognized her voice. Emily couldn’t imagine that she was the only girlfriend who was trying to reach a boyfriend at the school, or was she?
“I leave a message for Mr. Brett, yes?” Carla asked.
Emily always found it amusing that Carla ended every sentence with a question mark.
“Yes, please,” Emily said. “Tell him I’ll be there by 6 on Friday.”
“6”? Carla asked.
“18 hundred hours,” Emily said, correcting herself.
She heard Carla laugh, and say, “Oh, I wondered; 6 was too early to be in Florence.”
“Yes,” Emily said.
“Okay, I give Mr. Brett the message. Have a safe journey, Miss Emily. Ciao,” Carla said.
Emily was also tickled that she referred to Brett as Mr. Brett. And she was Miss Emily, like they were characters in an Edith Wharton novel or something. Emily hung up the phone and quickly put the lock back on.
She then spent the next four days waiting for it to be Thursday night. She’d have to take the train from London to Dover, then get on a ferry crossing the English Channel to reach Calais. She’d have to travel through France and even some parts of Switzerland until she reached Florence. It was a long journey, over 21 hours, and even though she had gotten a window seat and could rest her head on the glass, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Emily had brought some food with her - two egg salad sandwiches, a green apple, and an orange. This wasn’t nearly enough to sustain her that long, but she figured she would make up for it by the amount of pasta she intended to eat once she got there. When she glanced at one of the egg salad sandwiches a few hours into her trip, it looked like a very sorry sandwich. She realized it was because she hadn’t made the egg salad the traditional American way. The only mayonnaise she could find at the market came in a tube that looked like toothpaste. And that, Emily thought, was kind of disgusting.
The last few months she had lived in London she had seen quite a few strange food items. Condiments that were dark brown that at first she thought were some sort of chocolate spread, rather than the brown sauce it was meant to be. And the green stuff in jars that was described as mint? That looked equally palate-bruising. There were also tons of weird ketchup concoctions and then she found what looked like tubes of toothpaste. But looking at the packaging, she realized they were filled with anchovy paste or sardines, and even something that looked like parsley, all of which she thought were okay. However, because of her aversion to mayo in that format, she spread some butter on a couple of slices of wheat bread, cut up two hard boiled eggs, and made do.
It was nearly 8 p.m. when Emily finally arrived in Florence. She got off the train and looked around the station. She scanned the platform but didn’t see Brett. She started to get worried. Did he get the message that she was arriving today? If he didn’t, how would she reach him? She had the address of where he was living, but she had only been to Florence once before and wasn’t confident she could find his apartment.
Emily headed towards the signs that said Uscita, but then she saw a woman approach her. The woman was clutching a pink slip of paper in one hand and holding the hand of a young boy in the other.
“Are you Miss Emily?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“Carla,” she said, extending her hand with the pink slip of paper still in it. “I forgot to give the message to Mr. Brett and now he is gone.”
“What do you mean he’s gone?”
“He went on a field trip,” Carla said.
“Field trip? What field trip?” Emily asked, repeating Carla’s words.
“Yes, overnight, with his class. To visit someplace historic,” Carla said. And then she started to wave her hand a bit.
Emily didn’t understand what kind of field trip the school would have planned. Why visit another historic place when you were already in one? And what were the odds of it being the exact same weekend that she was supposed to see Brett?
Carla looked embarrassed. “I know. It’s my fault. You need not have come. The journey was so far for you!”
Emily didn’t disagree but wondered what she was going to do now. And what about her plans to eat copious amounts of pasta and drink red wine? And how did Carla even know that she was Emily?
But before she could ask her any of those questions, Carla said, “So, I come here to get you. You come home with me. You sleep on my sofa, and I’ll make you dinner,” Carla said.
Cara wanted her to take the pink message she had written earlier in the week, but Emily wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it, so she just put it in her coat pocket. And then she followed Carla home.
Emily didn’t understand much Italian, none actually, so she wasn’t sure what Carla was saying to the little boy, whom she gathered was the son that Brett had referred to. Occasionally the boy would look at her and shyly smile, but mostly he kept to himself. When she asked him his name, he looked at his mother, and she realized that he didn’t speak any English.
“Marco,” Carla said.
After a brisk 15-minute walk, Emily was climbing the stairs to Carla’s apartment building. It looked like an ugly post-war structure but inside the rooms were large and had high ceilings.
“Please,” Carla said, indicating the sofa she assumed would be her bed for the night.
Emily put her bag down and took off her coat.
“I make pasta, okay?” Carla asked.
Emily nodded. “That would be great,” Emily said. “Grazie,” she added, trying out the basic Italian she knew. But first she wanted to ask Carla how she knew what train she’d be on.
Carla shrugged. “There’s only one train from Londra (saying it the Italian way) that arrives at that time.”
Emily watched as Carla busied herself in the kitchen, slicing off shards of Parmigiana Reggiano from a big chunk, and putting them on a saucer for Emily and Marco to nibble on. She sat down at the small dining room table that was pushed into one corner of the kitchen. Marco was sitting there too, reading Topolino, a comic book that looked like the Italian version of Mickey Mouse. She watched as his fingers ran over the words he was trying to read, and she caught Carla looking at him.
“He can read but he can’t tell time,” she said.
‘What?” Emily asked.
“I know, it’s very strange,” Carla said.
Emily remembered when she learned how to tell time and the “what time is it if the little hand is on the 3 and the big hand is on the 12?” exercise.
Carla shrugged again. “I try, but I have to try some more. Plus, if you tell him we’ll be eating dinner in five minutes or 24 minutes, he has no idea what that means, because the clock means nothing to him.”
Emily nodded, and when she looked over to take a peek at the comic book he was reading, he gave it to her, and then said something quite animated in Italian to his mother.
Carla looked at her and said, “He hopes you like my carbonara, because I don’t make it the traditional way. I use penne because Marco likes penne better than spaghetti. It’s easier for him to eat.”
Besides the chunks of parmesan that Carla had initially placed on the table, there were now some dark green olives and thick slices of crusty bread, too. Carla poured her a glass of wine and motioned for her to eat and drink, so Emily didn’t hesitate. She was hungry, and by the time Carla put a bowl of steaming hot penne with tiny bits of guanciale and egg in front of her, she dug in. Carla kept encouraging her to grate as much parmesan as she wanted on the penne, and to have more bread and wine, too!
After the pasta, Carla served her a small green salad. And then a plate of figs, each one cut in half. She reached for a fig and when she bit into it, the juice just dribbled out of her mouth and ran down her chin. Marco started to laugh when he saw the mess she was making, so she started to laugh too, and then reached for a paper napkin to wipe her mouth.
Carla put more cut-up figs on the table and then some cookies. “Amaretti biscotti,” Carla said. “Have you had them?” she asked.
Emily shook her head no.
“I make espresso, do you want one?”
Emily looked at her and asked, “Can I have a cappuccino instead?”
“Ah, you Americans,” Carla said. “No. You only drink cappuccino in the morning.”
“Why is that?” Emily asked.
But Carla just shrugged. “It’s because, it’s just…” And then she started to rub her stomach and Marco started copying his mother and started rubbing his stomach too, which made all three of them laugh.
Emily heard Marco say “digestivo” and then “digestivo” again. Until Emily saw Carla take out a bottle of something so yellow it looked like urine.
“Milk is not good to drink after dinner, so we try this Grappa,” Carla said.
And then Emily saw Marco look at this mother and say, “Cappuccino Carla.”
Carla looked at her and shrugged. “That’s what the students at the school call me because they know they’re not allowed to ask me any questions in the morning before I have my cappuccino.”
Emily wanted to tell Carla that Brett had written that to her in his last letter, but she didn’t. She suddenly didn’t miss Brett at all, which was a little weird. She briefly wondered what their weekend would have been like together, or even their first meal together, after being apart for so long. But then she decided the carbonara Carla made for her was probably better than any dish she and Brett might have ordered in a restaurant.
Emily saw a coffee cup at one end of the table that was stuffed with colored pencils, and she reached over to grab a blue one. She grabbed a napkin, too, and drew a circle on it, and then the numbers 1-12 around the inside of the circle.
“Clock,” she said to Marco.
He repeated it, and then said, “Orologio,” which Emily figured was “clock” in Italian.
Carla had poured herself another piss-colored looking Grappa as she sat watching Emily try to teach Marco how to tell time. In English. Suddenly, Carla wondered if she should make Miss Emily a cappuccino after all. And when she opened her tiny fridge to take out a little container of milk, Emily saw it – a toothpaste tube filled with something strangely Italian.
A fine read.