Chapter 28
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, while Paul napped, I wandered over to Bar Sanna, where we’d been told we could place international calls. I knew I couldn’t afford to talk for long, but I wanted to tell my parents we’d made it to La Maddalena in one piece and that, before too long, a letter would follow.
Like a lot of bars in Italy, Bar Sanna had ornate wood paneling; a mirrored backsplash lined with shelves of pretty liquor bottles; and glass cases full of fruit crostatas and chocolate tarts.
On the long marble counter sat a gleaming La Marzocco espresso maker next to a stack of tiny white cups and saucers.
All of this was very normale, but what set Bar Sanna apart was the bank of telephone bays that ran along the far wall.
Bar Sanna was officially a posto pubblico, which meant that the bar had been authorized by the phone company to operate a public telephone switchboard. According to Tom, we could make calls there every day of the week except Tuesday, when, for some reason, we had to go to Bar Shanghai instead.
I stood in a short line (ahead of me, two German tourists agonized over the pastry case), and when I got to the counter, I used my phrase book to make my request: “Voglio telefonare negli Stati Uniti, per favore.” The woman on the other side of the counter nodded ferociously and, in a voice at least three times louder than it needed to be, said something I didn’t understand.
When she realized that I had no idea what she was saying, she gestured toward the end of the bar, where there were these little slips of paper and some pens.
It was a form she wanted me to fill out, and I did the best I could with it, then waited a good ten or fifteen minutes while she made several more drinks and had a prolonged conversation with a customer.
Finally, she took the slip from me and walked to the end of the counter, where she picked up a handset and hit some buttons on what I hoped was a switchboard.
She spoke with an operator, and when she was satisfied with whatever had transpired on the other end of the line, she got my attention and pointed at the bank of phones.
“Vai nella prima cabina,” she said. I stared at her blankly, so she held up one finger and said in that same too-loud voice, “Number one.”
It wasn’t until I had folded myself into the booth that I realized how badly I wanted one of my parents to be at home and available to accept the call.
I’d been gone less than a week, but it felt like a lifetime, and I think I needed someone to remind me that I was still the same old Eileen, just plunked down somewhere new.
I picked up the receiver and listened to a faraway ringtone. When I heard my mother’s tinny “Hello?” I practically yipped with joy.
“It’s me! Eileen!” I said, twisting around to give the woman at the bar a thumbs-up, but she’d already moved on.
“You got there okay?” asked my mother, and I turned back to the wall in an effort to hear her a little better.
“Yeah, we’re here,” I said, and described the whole setup at Bar Sanna. “Calling’s expensive, so I can’t stay on long. I just wanted to tell you we made it.”
There was a slight delay, which reminded me that my voice was—somehow—traveling through tiny wires that ran from this remote island to the mainland of Sardinia, and then where?
Rome? New York? I pictured each word of ours zipping along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and then it just seemed remarkable that we could speak to each other at all.
“How is everything?” my mother asked, and I didn’t know where to begin.
“It’s beautiful. Like a paradise,” I said.
“How’s Paul? Has he started work?”
I told her a little bit about the tender and Santo Stefano, but I realized we’d already been on the phone longer than I’d intended, and I had no idea what the call was going to cost.
“I’ll write everything down for you. In a letter,” I promised. “Is Dad home?”
“He’s out mowing the yard. Let me go get him.”
I calculated the time it’d take for my mother, who was no doubt standing in the kitchen with the phone cord wrapped around her waist, to get outside and wave him down.
She’d shout something at him, and he’d cut the engine, ask her to repeat whatever it was she’d just said.
Eileen’s on the phone! she’d say for the third or fourth time.
And he’d ask, Now? Then it’d be at least another minute or two before he made it to the kitchen.
I was fairly certain I couldn’t afford all that.
“Stop, Mom. Don’t. You there?” I said, praying she hadn’t already put down the phone and headed for the backyard.
“I’m here.”
“I’ve got to go. But I’ll try to call you again soon.”
“Okay,” she said. “We love you, baby.”
I could feel my eyes brimming with hot tears, and I almost begged her not to go, to give me a few more minutes, to tell me that I hadn’t done the wrong thing, marrying a guy I barely knew and moving halfway around the world with him. But all I said was “I love you, too.”
I was still teary-eyed when I returned to the bar to pay, but when the woman told me I owed her twenty-four thousand five hundred lire, the equivalent of about thirty-six dollars, what I wanted to do was sob.
My instinct was to argue—I couldn’t have been on the phone longer than ten minutes—but the only phrase on the first page of my phrase book that even came close to capturing what I needed to say was Non capisco, or I don’t understand.
I said it as passionately as I knew how, but she was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, withdrawing a worn piece of paper from somewhere underneath the bar and pointing to a chart in the center of it.
On Saturdays, during peak hours, station-to-station calls were five thousand two hundred fifty lire for the first three minutes, and one thousand seven hundred fifty lire for each additional minute.
I had been on the phone for quattordici minuti, she explained, and—like it or not—the call was going to cost me as much as a car payment.
“Capisci?” she said, and I nodded slowly, then reached for my wallet.
What I capisci-ed was that I would not be calling my parents again for a very long time.