Changing Tables
Among the crowd stroll a forty-something couple. To the interested observer they are obviously from North of the Alps. He is a big man, self-conscious of the fifty or so excess pounds he is carrying. His skin is reddy pink, not burnt, but also not accustomed to the harsh Southern sun. The beaney hat, camera and the “Rough Guide to Italy” clutched in his right hand are obvious giveaways of his provenance. But there are other tell tales: he wears a plain ‘T’ shirt and shorts, a little too informal for the Italian middle classes out on an evening stroll; his sandals have heavy buckles and straps made of thick and chunky leather and; his walk is too fast and purposeful for a Southern Italian man. He moves like someone intent on arriving at a particular place at a particular time, rather than someone who is simply enjoying the journey and the chance encounters it may bring.
She is harder to place. She is slim and olive skinned and wears a close fitting pale blue silk dress and flip-flops. Her eyes are darting from face to face and from one detail to another. Her stroll is relaxed and sinuous and every few minutes she changes direction to investigate a new shop window. However, apart from the fact that she is obviously with the English man, there are other things that mark her out as a foreigner: her hair is light brown and not raven black or peroxide blonde (with raven black roots); her eyes are an arresting blue-green, rather than dark green; there is an absence of bling about her and; crucially, she appears not to be wearing any make-up.
Our couple are no doubt on holiday. They have perhaps two weeks of rest and recovery from their busy working lives in, let’s say, London. It’s a stressful business this holidaymaking. Two days travelling there and back and just thirteen in which to enjoy oneself with whatever combination of adventure, beach, booze and culture represents your perfect break. Like it or not it is hard to take one’s eye off one’s watch and the calendar. In the first week one can comfort oneself with the thought that the holiday is not yet half over but in the second the countdown begins until that all too soon moment when the dirty clothes have to be squeezed back into the same space in which the neatly folded clean ones arrived. In the hiatus between the arrival and departure lounges we are under intense pressure to enjoy ourselves and to compile the photographic evidence to support this fact.
From the state of our man’s skin we can assume that our couple have arrived in Italy in the last day or so. He is eyeing the tables set out on the pavements for a likely place to eat, perhaps their first Italian meal of the holiday. After a few words with his partner they hesitantly approach one of the three restaurants in a small, busy piazza.
“Una tavola?” The slim young waiter repeats.
“Of course sir. This a way.” He beckons.
They are led to a small table next to the façade of the restaurant and adjacent to a dark alley down which points a notice on which is written the word “toilettes”. They are three or four tables away from the edge of the piazza and can see very little.
“Ingleesh?” The young waiter asks.
“Yes, er, si.” Our man replies.
The waiter disappears into the restaurant and remerges with two battered menu cards .
“Any idea what ‘frays of colt’ might be?” Our man asks his partner as he reads the menu.
“Why don’t you ask?” She replies. (Actually, by a poetic accident this description has been given to a kind of shredded dried horsemeat.) Eventually they order two pizzas, a salad and a bottle of wine, selected by our man on the age-old principal of ordering the second cheapest red on the list, although he hesitated for a moment at its description as “primitivo”. The wine, pizzas and salad arrive at five minute intervals so that, far from the leisurely meal he had hoped for, they are faced with a choice of ordering desert or an early return to their hotel a mere thirty minutes after they were first seated.
They order two tiramisus and two coffees and while he is waiting our man hears some words of English drift in from the piazza.
“Have you been to this place before?” Asks a male voice.
“Yes, we often come here for lunch from school.” A female voice replies.
“Looks a bit touristy.”
“No really, its fine. And Cosimo comes here a lot. He knows the owner.”
Our man can see now that the words are being spoken by another forty-something couple who appear to be part of a party of ten or twelve people. A man in a dark suit with a crisp white open-necked shirt rushes from the restaurant interior, shakes hands with one of the party and beckons to a large table at the very edge of the piazza. He showily removes a “riservata” sign from its centre and beckons again to the group. A debate erupts in rapid Italian. From the doubtful expressions being exchanged it seems that this table is not quite to the liking of one or more of the group. A slight man with a small pointed beard wearing a yellow shirt and pinstriped trousers indicates to the man in the dark suit a smaller table nearby. The man in the suit shrugs and snaps his fingers at which a waiter and waitress rush from the restaurant and following a few rapid instructions begin disassembling the larger table to extend the smaller one. After a few minutes extra place settings are laid at the extended table and the party take their seats, seemingly satisfied with the new arrangement.
Our man is distracted from watching the scene as two plates containing small slices of tiramisu are hurriedly plonked on the table. “Grazie.” He says to the waiter’s back as he hurries into the restaurant.
A few minutes later, as our man sips at a tiny cup of lukewarm, but very strong and bitter coffee, he observes plate after plate of interesting looking tit bits being ferried to the large party’s table by the waiter and waitress. Among the dishes are plates of mussels, octopus salad, and a profusion of sliced meats and cheeses. The diners pick enthusiastically at the food as they converse animatedly in Italian. The laughter and wine flow in equal measure.
Our man looks at the couple who he had assumed are English and who now seem to be speaking in fluent Italian to other members of the group and he feels a dart of envy. “How did these people get here and how is it they seem so at ease?” He asks himself. For a moment he catches the man’s eye and a look is exchanged between them. Then the waiter returns and delivers the bill, unsolicited – a sure sign that they will soon be outstaying their welcome. His anxiety mounts as he unfolds it and looks at the total. He makes a quick mental calculation and with a vague sense of disappointment notes that it is about the same as he would have paid in their local pizzeria at home and therefore about double what he had been hoping. Fortunately he has the right banknotes to cover the bill plus about ten percent, thus avoiding the need for further communication. “Shall we?” He asks his partner. “Yes, I’m ready.” She replies and they rise and make their way back into the crowds still milling through the piazza.
♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀
I am at the other table with my partner Sue and it is me that exchanged the glance with our man. The time was a year or two ago and the place was Martina Franca, a market town of about fifty thousand souls in rural Apulia. Sue and I had left England in our yacht about six years before and after cruising the Mediterranean for a couple of years, we had bought and renovated a small house in Apulia with an acre of olive trees.
When I saw our man and his partner I was in conversation with Cosimo, the owner of a School of English where Sue taught. I can’t remember where our conversation was going at the time I saw them, but something about them made me change tack.
“Have you noticed that couple at the table over to my left?” I said.
“The tourists? No not particularly. Why?” He said.
“They are Sue and I six years ago, before we left England.”
“How do you know they are English?”
“The same way you know they are not Italian, I just know. But it’s not just that they are English, it’s the type of people they are. They’re really trying to soak in the atmosphere of this place and appreciate it. But they don’t have the language and cultural background to understand what’s going on around them. They feel like what they are – foreigners. I’ve had that feeling sat at so many restaurant tables all over the Mediterranean on my two-week holidays. And now I can imagine that guy looking at me and seeing me as a local, an insider.”
“Well you are a local now.” Cosimo says.
“Up to a point I suppose. But I am still English and my Italian is worse than the average five year old. Though I guess I don’t feel like a foreigner anymore. No, in fact I feel very at home here.”
I take a sip of my wine and survey our table, now loaded with plates of antipasti. The majority of our party is Italian and the conversation is flowing freely in a mixture of Italian and English. We are sat at the most prominent table in the best restaurant in a small oval piazza, no more than a hundred metres wide, surrounded by colonnaded walkways and baroque facades. The predominant colours of the buildings are cool grey stone and powdery white lime wash. Overhead I can just make out a few of the brighter stars not completely drowned out by the street lamps and the lights shining through the shop and apartment windows. I am wearing a loose short-sleeved linen shirt and I can feel a slightly cooling breeze against my skin after the savage heat of the summer day. I feel relaxed and at ease.
“It’s a funny thing,” I say to Cosimo. “Sue and I have come a long way since we set off from London in our little yacht six years ago. We had no idea where we were going other than in the general direction of the Mediterranean. We had a few adventures and a few storms along the way, but the most difficult journey has been the one from that table over there to this one here.”
“Are we Italians so very hard to understand?” Cosimo says.
“Maybe not as individuals, but yes, your language and culture is pretty difficult to get to know. Don’t tell me that despite your many trips to London there aren’t lots of things about the English that still leave you completely mystified?”
“Yes. The powdered coffee that everyone drinks.” He says.
“Exactly, to understand why the English drink instant coffee you need to know something about how the English relate to food and how the relationship developed. Getting that understanding is a slow process and you don’t even have the time to start it on a two week holiday, assuming that you want to.”
“The queues. Everyone stands in line in such an orderly way. It’s quite unnerving.” Cosimo says.
“Right. But making this kind of cultural journey also changes you, so that the me sat at that table over there and the me sat here are now different people. To the me over there this Piazza, Martina Franca, Apulia even, are a picturesque backdrop to my everyday life led mainly in, let’s say, London. To that me we are all a bit of local colour. I mean he would like to know more and I’m sure he feels frustrated about the language barrier and so on, but he’s on holiday, he isn’t really here to learn. But for the me of today Apulia is my home and I see it as somewhere real, not picturesque.”
“Milk delivered by electric cart at dawn. That is a very peculiar thing.” Cosimo interjects again.
“Yes, OK. You’ve made your point, or should I say my point.”
“Sorry, I was beginning to enjoy this game.” Cosimo says. “Please continue.”
“Well that was it really. It’s been a long journey from that table to this one.” We both take a sip of our wine and I notice Sue out of the corner of my eye laughing at some remark made at her end of the table. “And yet …” I say. “Despite the fact that I feel at home here I will always be British. My upbringing in London provides me with the benchmarks against which I measure other cultures, so in the end it’s Britain I get to know better and not the other places through which I travel.”
“But it is not just the way you look at the world that has changed since you left Britain.” Cosimo says. “Your appearance has changed also.”
I laugh and press my stomach. “You mean this?” I say.
“Of course. How much weight have you lost since you came to Italy?”
“Well at first I put a load on. Then for a long time when I started losing weight I didn’t have any scales, so I don’t rightly know. But it’s a lot, my waist has shrunk by about twelve centimetres. And I guess I have Italy to thank for that. It’s here that for the first time in my life I really learnt how to cook and how to eat. Especially from Erminia.”
“Ah the wonderful Erminia.” Cosimo says, with an indulgent smile on his face.
“Wonderful indeed,” I think to myself as Cosimo resumes his exploration of the antipasti. Erminia is Sue and my eighty-three year old neighbour, surrogate Mum and repository of Apulian peasant wisdom. Most days she stomps up our drive thumping the ground with her stout walking stick and letting out little grunts of pain with each move of her worn-out hip joints. She brings with her a powerful whiff of wood smoke and is usually carrying something good to eat.
“Perhaps you should write a book about your experiences.” Cosimo muses, discarding the shell of a mussel onto a nearby plate.
“Oh God,” I cry, “don’t you think the world already has enough lifestyle books?”
This is frankly disingenuous on my part as before Sue and I left Britain we were both enthusiastic readers of travel books written by Brits and Americans who had upped sticks and moved to France, Italy or Spain in pursuit of a rural idyl. Indeed these books were a major source of inspiration for us to go travelling ourselves, as they have been for so many ex-patriates.
“No, I don’t think there are too many.” Cosimo replies. “Now that I can read English reasonably well I find it fascinating what you British and Americans write about my country. Sometimes the place they describe is almost recognisable as Italy. Well, an Italy on a planet not dissimilar to our own at any rate.”
“And the rest of the time?” I ask.
“Well, it’s a charming fairy tale place full of colourful characters and chaotic goings on where everything ends happily and I like fairy stories.”
“And is that what you think I would write? A fairy story?” I say, a little huffily.
“If you wrote it in English to an English speaking audience then I think it would be difficult for it to be anything else.”
“Why?”
Cosimo looks at me and shrugs. “Because in 410AD one of my ancestors watched the White Cliffs of Dover slowly disappear from view from the stern of a Roman galley and because one of your ancestors was sitting on the shore watching the galleys leave.”
“And from that time onwards we have become steadily more foreign to each other.” I say.
“Exactly.” Cosimo says. “And when the hunter meets another tribe, then returns to his own tribe to tell them of this new tribe, what kind of story does he tell?”
“A fairy story?” I suggest.
“Exactly. What else can it be? His tribe have never seen the other tribe before, but they have heard fantastic stories passed down the generations and the hunter has to tell his story in the context of all these old stories. If a person from the other tribe were to be hiding in the bushes listening to the hunter’s story told by the village fire it would of course seem fantastic to them too.”
“And if I were to write a story I could perhaps begin it with the two Brits on the table over there and the conversation it sparked off between us.”
“You could indeed.” Says Cosimo as he spears a leg of octopus with a decisive stab of his fork. “But you could of course change the details to suit your purpose, because it would, after all, only be a story.”
“Just a story.” I say, sipping my wine as I watch the two Brits beat a retreat into the crowds still thronging the piazza.
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