Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

25. Sciopero! (Strike!)

The weather has turned suddenly bitter—rain, wind, lowering skies— and Joe and I have both caught the germ that the students have been sharing among themselves by offering one another licks of their gelato cones and sips from their four-dollar cans of Coke and by their constant hugging, kissing and grooming of one another. This physical need they have for touch and for sitting in one another’s laps (at least the girls do this) must be a function of their being far away from home. The girls spend hours, often in public places, braiding and arranging one another ’s hair, and three of the boys have hired Rosanna to dye their hair brilliant red, orange, or purple. They think it a lark to call one another “Pomodoro,” “ Arancia,” and “Porpora.” In the apartment today there is no heat and no running water. I call downstairs to see whether Maria or Patty or their landlady, Paola, knows the reason for the trouble, but no one is home. Joe is getting ready to take the bus to il centro to teach his class. He bundles up in sweater, raincoat, and hat. I—rather than stay in the apartment and freeze—decide to go to the tabaccaio and buy francobolli—stamps for the postcards I want to send to friends. We part at the bus stop; Joe rarely has to wait more than five 107 25 Sciopero! (Strike!) minutes for a #14 bus, though—if I’m with him and one passes by just as we approach the corner—I always cry out, “Oh, no, oh, wait, wait!” as if this bus were the last one on earth. As I walk the two blocks to the tabaccaio (a capital “T” is posted outside the store as an indication that bus tickets and stamps may be bought within), I look in the window of the pasticceria, where the most luscious fruit pies are displayed, along with cream puffs and lemon cakes. I pass the libreria (the book store), and the macelleria (where beef and chicken parts hang on hooks in the window.) Much further down Via Aretina is David Due, a trattoria and pizzeria that has a statue of David (wearing a green loincloth ) in the entryway. (Their pizzas, like most pizzas in Italy, are baked in a wood-fired oven, and come out deliciously thin and crisp, with every possible adornment, including tonno, speck, funghi, prosciutto, cipolla, melanzane, and all varieties of cheese. It’s always eaten with a fork and knife, never by hand.) The rain is coming down hard now—I think of getting back to the apartment, lighting the oven, and sitting in the kitchen to keep warm. My problem is that I manage to get the oven lit only half the time. Most of my efforts conclude with the match burning down to my fingertips so that I have to drop it and then mash out the flame with my foot. That, or the gas simply does not ignite. When the smell of gas becomes too strong, I give up, in fear of an explosion, and open the windows to air out the kitchen. The last time I visited Santa Croce, however, I sinned in the desire to get my oven lit. Although I put 200 lire in the offertory under the table where votive candles are lit, I didn’t light a candle. Instead, I put one in my backpack and took it home in order to light the oven with a long taper instead of a one-inch match. Today, in the tabacccaio, the young woman who greets me has sold me stamps before. She knows my routine—I tell her that I want “dieci francobolli per cartolina USA,” and she does the rest of the figuring out. Each stamp to the United States costs 1,250 lire; they come in denominations of 1,000 and 250. There is no way I am able to say in Italian , within a reasonable frame of time, the numbers represented by the necessity of buying ten 1,250-lire stamps. She knows my dilemma; she Merrill Joan Gerber 108 even puts the stamps in a little cellophane bag for me. She takes my money, she gives me change. I indicate “freddo”—it’s cold out. I further indicate—by a pantomime and a serious mangling of her language—that there’s no heat in my...