Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty Two
Giovanni
Under the portico, the air is turning slightly warmer. Still cool enough to hurry people along, but warm enough to loosen them up.
Bianca approaches, looking down, clutching her bag to her side. We fall into step without planning it.
Luce di Bologna’s bell gives a faint ring as the door opens and closes welcoming the first customers. I don’t look back. She doesn’t either.
She’s quiet, but I sense the sadness in her, the wetness of her eyes, though she’s turned away from me.
I could say a dozen things. Every one of them is wrong. “You did the right thing.” Useless. “He’s proud of you.” True, but it would come off as pretentious. “You can still change your mind.” I don’t want her to. That thought is the one that stops me short.
Release the debt, let her go. It would be easy. It would also be a lie about who I am.
I’m not holding her for the balance sheet. Selfish. I say it to myself, almost scolding. The moment I saw her, the debt moved to the back burner. I want her near me. It’s not the smartest thing, I imagine, but there it is.
Her elbow brushes my sleeve when a bicycle rattles past too closely, forcing her to step in toward me.
“Scusa,” she says automatically, barely above a whisper.
“Nothing to excuse.”
We cross a narrow street. A delivery truck noses into the curb. A kid on a scooter brakes hard and glares at a pigeon as if it offended him personally.
An old woman shakes a tablecloth out a second-floor window and dust drifts down like gauze. This city is never theatrical about being itself; it just is.
She points with her chin more than her hand. “Two streets over,” she says. “Via San Leonardo.” The first words she offers on her own since she walked out of Sorrentino’s with her face set in that hard line people use in order not to cry.
I nod and don’t crowd. We pass a shop that sells only buttons; another that looks like it sells only dust and records.
Someone somewhere is reducing a sauce too quickly; the air offers a hint of caramelizing sugar and the sigh of onions as they give up and turn sweet.
She breathes a little deeper when the aroma moves through the arcade, and for two steps, her mouth softens at the corners. Then the aroma dissipates, and so does the softness.
“How did your boss take it?” I ask finally.
“He was himself,” she says.
I’m not sure what that means. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad.
She works her lower lip between her teeth, lets it go. “He gave me a recommendation if I ever need it.” A small beat. “And a spoon.”
The confusion only lasts a moment.
Of course, a spoon. I picture heavy wood, decades of work burned into it. Sentiment among chefs.
“Good,” I say. Because I’m not sure how to make this better, take that look off her face and replace it with something happier.
We turn left. The portico changes style, columns a little chunkier, bricks patched where time has shaped them.
She stops at a wooden door with an iron latch polished by generations of hands and keys. A brass plate shows three surnames.
She pulls a key out and deftly opens the door, pushing it in with her shoulder. She holds it open for me, and we step into a dim stairwell that smells like stone, old mail, and drying lavender.
No elevator. Narrow stairs. Terracotta treads rubbed thin in the center by thousands of footsteps. She takes them in a steady rhythm, hand sliding over the cool iron railing that runs up.
I could offer to carry her bag. This is her apartment. She’s done this a million times.
Second landing. A window the size of a shoebox offers a slice of sky the color of unpolished pewter.
Third landing. She shifts her shoulders, breathes once, and keeps going. The silence between us isn’t empty; it’s loaded with all the things she’s keeping inside.
Fourth floor. She stops, keys already in her hand, and turns down a short hall. Her door is painted the kind of green that only looks good in old buildings. The key turns, and the bolt slides back with a heavy thud.
She pushes in and steps aside to let me pass. I don’t, not first. It’s her home. She goes in, and I follow.
It’s small by the measure of American apartments.
By Bologna standards, it’s perfect.
Light comes in from high windows and a set of glass doors at the far end that open to a shallow balcony no wider than a man’s stride.
The ceiling carries beams that have seen more years than my company, more years than my father ever planned. The floor is the old cotto, warm underfoot even when the air isn’t.
To the right is the kitchen. Two burners, not four. A gas oven that would make most American recipes panic.
Open shelving that holds bowls that are actually used routinely, and stacks of dishes that occasionally match. A well-used wooden board leans against the wall; the mattarello rests on a bracket above it like a beloved instrument.
There’s a jar of salt on the counter—flaky, not cheap—and a bottle of grocery-store olive oil that awaits frying jobs while the prestige oil one lives in dark glass in a cupboard.
Hooks hold two pans: one stainless, one carbon steel worn thin at the center and black as a moonless field.
A small table sits under the window. Two chairs.
The table holds a shallow bowl with two lemons, one that should probably be used today and one that can sit a little longer. There’s a linen runner that looks as if it’s been washed a hundred times. A corkscrew sits halfway under it like someone left in a hurry.
Which, I suppose, she did.
She has no television in the main room. Shelves run along one wall with books that are mostly cookbooks, but not all; I see a novel with the spine broken in the middle and a book on regional dialects.
A framed photo stands behind a small plant: not a posed wedding shot, not glamour. It looks like an old picture, people at a table outside, hands mid-gesture, someone laughing so hard her eyes are shut.
A desk the size of a cafe table holds a laptop and a stack of legal pads, most of them written on both sides and dog-eared.
Two stubby pencils. A roll of blue tape—the kitchen kind, not the office kind.
A black Sharpie. She apparently labels everything the way a cook does: clearly, with the assumption that someone else will need to know what this is and when she made it.
On a peg near the door, a canvas tote hangs with the logo of the Saturday market stamped crooked in green ink. Below it sits a pair of used-to-be white sneakers that are creased and well-worn.
Beside those: a pair of black flats with the right toe nicked. I find that detail inexplicably human.
The balcony holds terracotta pots. Rosemary gone a little woody and stubbornly alive, thyme flourishing, a pot of flat parsley that is trying. A clothespin bag hangs from a hook. A line runs overhead for drying shirts.
Her bedroom is visible through an open doorway: a narrow bed, a white cover, a print of something abstract on the wall.
I stand in the middle of the apartment, taking in the layout the same way I take in every room I enter.
But I also look because I want to. This is the first place of hers I’ve been in. The absence of anything performative is its own statement.
No clutter. No staged minimalism. Things chosen and kept because they work and because they are loved. She’s not trying to impress with the space. It’s just where she lives.
She doesn’t tour me. She goes quiet as soon as the door closes and moves through the rooms on autopilot. Her coat goes to a hook. She crosses to the kitchen and pulls out a case from a cupboard: a black zippered leather case the length of her arm. I know before she unzips it what’s inside.
Knives. The real set. The ones she didn’t bring because she didn’t know she was staying. The ones a cook’s hand reaches for before her brain registers it.
She stands at the counter, opens the case, and lays the roll out like a ritual. I stand in the doorway and say nothing. This moment is not for me.
Steel. Not shiny. Cared for. The chef’s knife is the most easily recognizable one in the lineup. Then there’s a bread knife, tweezers, a spoon, plus a few other knives I don’t know the names of.
She runs a thumb along the spine of the chef’s knife like she’s greeting an old friend and then wipes the blade on a cloth in the case. She doesn’t check the edge; she doesn’t have to. She knows.
She opens her bag and pulls out a canvas roll that still looks stiff. One by one, she migrates the tools that make her who she is from the life she’s been living to the life she’s walking into. The gesture is small.
But it means everything.
“You don’t have to go through everything,” I say when I trust my voice. “I can have a crew pack it and ship it. Books, clothes, whatever. Furniture too, if you want it.”
She pauses with her hand on the steel. Doesn’t look up right away. When she does, the look isn’t defense; it’s evaluation.
“The furniture can go,” she says. “Most of it. The bed was cheap. The table I like.” She glances at the mat board and mattarello. “Those come. Cookbooks can be boxed. Clothes too.”
A breath. “But my knives come with me. And a few other things.”
“Done.”
I take out my phone and send a short message to a man. He replies with a thumb before I even put the phone away. He knows the drill and will make sure everything arrives in the same condition.
She slides the last blade into a pocket, flips the roll, ties it off.
She crosses to the bookshelf and pulls down five titles without hesitating: a regional Italian pastry book with grease on the corners; an M.F.K.
Fisher collection; Samin’s salt-fat-acid book in Italian; an old paperback that looks like it’s seen a beach bag more than once; a notebook thicker than the rest with elastic around it, gone white with overuse.
She adds a slim folder and tucks it all into a tote.