Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

42. Massimo’s Lizard-Skin Keychains, Riccardo’s Castagna

Mai Jing’s boyfriend, Massimo, has not forgotten his pledge to make us dinner. On a night wild with rain and thunder, he picks us up at the gate in his little red car, with Mai Jing, smiling and speechless, sitting in the front seat beside him. He tears along the lungarno and over the Ponte Verrazzano to pick up Mrs. Pedrini at her apartment. Believing that Joe knows Italian, Massimo talks at great speed, turning his head over his shoulder to address Joe, while keeping his foot on the gas and ignoring Mai Jing’s cries of “Go slow, look out, be careful, you will murder us.” Faith that we will get through this evening alive is what sustains me. Faith is what got me to Italy in the first place: faith that we would have adventures (Joe promised, “I can’t tell you exactly what will happen, but something will . . .”), faith that my mother would continue to live (as she has), faith that we would learn how to shop and travel and eat in Italy (we have), and faith that our adventures will ultimately be good ones. The rain is sheeting across the windshield so heavily that Massimo must thrust his head out of the window in order to see anything at all while he drives. When he stops for Mrs. Pedrini, she runs out to get in the car, the rain plastering her hair to her face. After he takes off with 208 42 Massimo’s Lizard-Skin Keychains, Riccardo’s Castagna a jolt, she grasps my hand and whispers to me she’s lucky she’s had seventy -two good years of life so far, since this may well be the end of it. How do young men get along in Italy? Massimo’s means of support is unclear. He appears to be a shining example of health, sexual energy, ambition, cleverness, good humor, and craziness. By interpreting a combination of mime, gesture, and intonation, with footnotes from Mai Jing, we learn he has been, by turns, a judo expert, a mountain climber, a student of psychology, a seller of fish, and a biker who rode 2,700 miles through the Dolomites (or to the Dolomites, I can’t tell which); now he makes his living by “buying and selling.” What he sells, and to whom, we can only guess. There is much “buying and selling” in Florence; tourists buy, Florentines sell, everything from rosaries to rare antiques, from fake David statues to sets of hand-painted Italian dishes, from leather wallets to thousand-dollar Gucci handbags. (There is also the drug trade. When I walk by the river, I often see discarded needles and syringes.) Like the young men our girls met when they first came here (the men who invited them to the clothing warehouse in the country), Massimo wheels and deals. After another wild ride, he stops his car halfway up a curb and announces we are at his house: please, to follow him. Jumping through ankle-deep puddles, he leads us up an alleyway, around a corner, through a doorway, until we find ourselves in an ancient building smelling of concrete and cement particles, whose crumbling walls are only half-standing. “Now just up to the fourth floor,” he says, taking the steps two at a time. Mrs. Pedrini takes my arm on one side, Joe on the other. They know my knees aren’t doing that well. “Up we go,” Mrs. Pedrini says. “One step at a time.” Massimo, in his two-room apartment (which he tells us he bought for the lire equivalent of $200,000!), is making fish for dinner. Not any fish, but fish fresh from the sea, brought to Florence by a “special Botticelli Blue Skies 209 friend” of his. He holds up two enormous silvery fish as if they are trophies . (When I shop in the market, I always forgo frozen fish, which sells for an average of about $10 for a single piece.) We all sit at a tiny wooden table about two feet from his stove (the room is perhaps eight feet long) while he slits the fish, stuffs them with cloves of garlic and parsley, and wraps them in tinfoil. He drops them in a large frying pan over a high flame and then begins making a salad and rice while Mai Jing cooks a Chinese specialty of sausage and noodles...