Work Text:
"But little by little things got better,
because you can learn everything,
if you want."
Gianni Rodari, Il giovane gambero
*
Luciano’s work as a barista was as much of a necessity as it was a burden, as much of an escape as it was a trap. It was an escape from Margherita, who, he knew beyond a shadow of doubt, would pester him mercilessly should he become a recluse, wallowing in memories at home. It was an escape from the memories, closing in on him like the walls of a tomb: if he was not careful, he spent too much time turning over familiar objects in his hands – a vase, a cup, a scarf – and thinking back on familiar routines – her picking up a cake for every occasion, her pinning her hair just so, her tilting her head with a warm smile, listening to Margherita’s excited chatter and assuaging her worries about the pregnancy. It was so recent, and yet so long ago. Luciano woke up tired and raw every morning.
But he woke up. And she never would.
He woke up and puttered about the apartment, ruthlessly made it tidy again, and made himself prim and presentable. He needed to maintain outward dignity, even if it was still active strife and combat to appear human and proper, clean and elegant instead of slovenly and unkempt. Grief did these things, hissed and scratched at people’s composure, dark and frightening, and it was terrifyingly easy to succumb and slide down into slothful misery, to look as woeful as one felt, and thus to cause pain and trouble to one’s loved ones. Luciano could not do that to Margherita and her husband, could not fathom doing that sort of thing to little Francesco. His family did not deserve that, and Luciano recoiled from the very thought of hurting and troubling them with his descent into a widower’s helpless madness. No matter how tempting and inescapable self-pity often seemed, it was revolting to cause such grievous harm, even inadvertently. Luciano resolved to avoid that at all cost. It was unconscionable to be such a bad father, to deprive his daughter of himself – she needed his support and his presence in her life, even if she was an adult, a married woman with a son. She still needed her father, and so Luciano had to be one, hale and sane, and not a mere shell of a man frozen in time and sinking deep in memories and fantasies of things which were now forever out of reach. Margherita needed him, and Francesco, too. So even though late at night, with the city’s heaving breaths pushing at the window shutters as he lay awake, cold under the covers, Luciano felt a thousand little cracks grow deeper and longer in his very being, he could not permit himself to leak through and be gone. Margherita and Francesco still needed him. He could not betray them like that.
He could not betray her like that, either. How could he not care for their daughter and grandchild? Margherita had already lost her mother, and Francesco would never know his grandmother. How could he deprive them of a father and a grandfather, too? Impossible. Luciano had to keep going.
Luciano was as he ever was, and yet, he wasn’t. He was changing, aging; and occasionally, whenever he permitted himself to think of it, it caused him physical pain to look at himself in the mirror, because he no longer looked the same as she had last seen him. The changes were infinitesimal at first, but they grew bigger with each passing day, with each passing year. His hair grew longer, and in the beginning, Luciano would cut it exactly like he used to; but his face gradually changed shape and his figure did, too, a new kind of heaviness settling in his features, and so eventually, he changed the length of his hair and the way that he styled it. It was a little, and yet it felt like a lot – an enormous, unstoppable rift growing between Luciano the married man and Luciano of today. Every new item of clothing that he bought and every old one that he had to part with, every new wrinkle, changing the brand of toothpaste that he used – every change felt momentous and unforgivable, and yet, inescapable. He lived. Life touched him and therefore, altered him.
Luciano de Luca was not the same man he was, but he still had to be good-looking, hard-working, a dutiful father, a modern grandfather. Someone she would not have been ashamed to have been married to.
It was certainly a personal failure on his part that, after several years, he still needed to actively remind himself of these things before walking out of the house in the morning, and that spark of anger at himself inevitably blazed into a fire of irascibility during the day, but he was doing his best to keep himself together. Hair brushed back, clean spectacles, shirt and waistcoat neatly buttoned down and hiding a growing soft belly. Luciano was certainly not as sharp as his younger colleagues, but he was still good-looking and well-liked, and it gave him a measure of contentment even if he could not envision wishing to be pursued. These days, the unexpected attention of the fair sex often made him feel cornered, but it was also a reassurance. It meant that he was successfully keeping up appearances. So he bore it with as much grace as possible, even though it vexed him. After all, work, too, vexed him more often than not: the very idea of making coffee for idlers was frivolous and left him fuming.
(And yes, Luciano knew he was being unfair. What was more natural than a good cup of coffee? Only a good glass of wine. But in the hazy mornings, whenever he took swift turns on the busy streets of Rome and walked to his workplace, peering into the colorful crowd as he approached the right address, he did not think of exhausted professionals flocking to enjoy a moment of respite, of friends and family pouring through the doorway for a cup of strong coffee and warm companionship, of lonely hearts in need of a hot sip to momentarily lift the weight of their shoulders. He did not think of anyone real, neither patrons nor colleagues. Just imprints of frustration, not people but imaginary shadows, and those shadows were the ones he interacted with more often than not, fanning the flames of his own bad temper and finding excuses to sulk. It was a ridiculous, pathetic, vicious habit, but he had fallen into it and did not know how to stop.)
Today, he sneaked in through the back entrance quickly, shutting the door behind himself and pressing his weight against it, as if this cowardly gesture would block out the world and his own morose thoughts, if only for a moment. He sighed and looked about, worried that someone might be privy to his moment of weakness this early in the day, when it couldn’t be brushed off as Luciano merely being tired from working on his feet for hours on end. But luckily, there was no one in the staff room, just Gigi Orsini rustling the crisp pages of the newspaper, looking over the rim of his spectacles and silently greeting Luciano with a soft smile.
Gigi was a good man. Young – well, younger, an excellent professional, insightful, observant and quiet. But it did not matter if Gigi saw him (even though Luciano never doubted that the man truly saw him, right through, to the quivering marrow of his bones, where Luciano was old, tired and bleak, and ultimately not good enough and not living up to his goals), because Gigi was, well, a friend. Perhaps the only friend Luciano had at this point, apart from his daughter. That’s what Gigi had told him a few years ago, when he had started working here, “You should have more friends.” Embarrassingly, it took Luciano many months to realize that what Gigi had meant was ‘you should have more friends, apart from me’. Because Luciano had not noticed them becoming fast friends, even though he recalled perfectly well how the two of them had been spending time together from the start, shoulder to shoulder in the dim dusty silence of the staff room, easy conversations about coffee and wine flowing freely and blending with impossibly sincere outbursts, and Luciano talking about his wife (and daughter, and grandson) – an unexpected profusion of intimate details which he had burdened Gigi with because he had had no one to talk to, and Gigi had been enough of a stranger to make it possible to say things one would never say to old acquaintances, because what if they discover a different you, a ruin and a wreck underneath the serenity and steadfastness? No, never. But Gigi had been accepting and genuinely kind. He had this way about him, a lightness, a freshness that really became a twenty-something youth rather than a man in his forties, and yet there it was – luminous acceptance, even playfulness, bottled down and hidden under a perpetually taciturn demeanor. Unlike Luciano, who was getting lost in his own head, his biases and suppositions, Gigi was astute and immediately saw people for who they really were. That, combined with his immense experience, was what made him brilliant at matching wines, leaving all the patrons raving with delight: he saw what people wished for, he saw their tastes and preferences, he saw who they really were. He had seen Luciano, too. Gigi had seen him, and he had not been appalled by his morbid weakness, and he had decided to be his friend. That was how Luciano chose to remember it, most of the time.
It was hard to reconcile himself to the other memory, the true one, of himself clinging to Gigi at a mere hint of acceptance, starving for a promise of friendship, needful of human contact and thirsting for companionship like a dying man thirsted for a sip of water in the desert. Bruising grief had made him pitiful and daring, opening up so fast, so abruptly, cracking open like a cup falling down the floor. But Gigi had been kind to him. That was the kind of man he turned out to be: kind, grounded and tender. Not that Luciano could claim any wisdom and ability to judge character from the beginning – only yearning and desperation. Now, on the mend, Luciano scarcely recognized himself from those days – locking up the establishment and pouring out his heart, rambling about his loss for long hours late into the night – but Gigi had been kind, and they were friends, and that was what mattered. Gigi had opened to Luciano, too, then, leading with, “I killed my father”. He had clearly kept a lot of things buried, too, and for all that he and his brother lived in each other’s pockets, Gigi must not have had many confidants. Sometimes, Luciano was not sure what had really helped him crawl out of the pit of despair. Was it telling Gigi about his broken heart, the debris dancing on the waves of time as the eternal city stood, implacable as ever? Or was it hearing Gigi’s story, learning of his grief and guilt, and tentatively, awkwardly trying to offer a measure of comfort? Luciano was not an eloquent man. But that time, the two of them alone, past midnight, basking in the brightness of incandescent bulbs overhead, Luciano had been grasping to find real words to convey his support, acceptance, and reassurance; for the first time in a long while, he had been looking to say something real, not hiding behind platitudes and empty phrases expected in a given social situation. Gigi had shared the story about him reconnecting with his brother and cousin, and how it had let to his father’s death, and Luciano had been there, present in the moment, struggling to be articulate but speaking from the heart. It had been like waking from a centuries’ long slumber. Clumsy, painful, and real. Life-changing.
Now, their relationship mattered more to him than he could comfortably express.
So today, Luciano smiled and nodded his greeting, and prepared to go on about his day. He could tell it would be a difficult one, but he was determined to power through, even though the air conditioning was capricious again and the air was stiflingly hot, and some obnoxious tourists wandered in, and the delivery was late, and there were no pleasant regulars, like that blonde woman who came in from time to time, probably during her lunch break and after working hours, and it began to rain cruelly, harsh torrents beating the pavement. Whoever wandered in was soaked through, and they huffed and puffed loudly, eager for their coffee; in the heat of the coffee shop, the water clinging to their clothes and hair turned into steam, and Luciano’s vision soon blurred from fatigue and this simulacrum of mist that smelled of sweat, anxiety, coffee and alcohol. He snapped at a fellow barista, twice, and was furious with himself for it. Useless rage condensed around him like a poisonous cloud. He hated being rude and unlikable, and worried that that was who he had really become, underneath the spectacles, the new haircut, the shirt he had bought for himself, alone, not asking if it was to his wife’s tastes. Excusing himself, he left the front to his colleague to sneak into the back and sulk.
It was ridiculous. Who was he fooling like this? He had to stop being so wound up and pathetic over trifles. Other people had done nothing to warrant his unreasonable wrath, and yet Luciano had been stuck in this pattern for so long his colleagues were used to it. He was not sure how to stop, if he was capable of controlling himself, or better, no longer having these shameful, unreasonable impulses. He could not keep up like this, something had to change. Perhaps Margherita was right, perhaps he could just stay at home and help look after Francesco… but Luciano did not feel ready yet, did not believe himself whole enough to be trusted. Francesco needed a better grandfather. And Luciano needed to smoke.
He opened the door and leaned listlessly against the doorway, lighting a cigarette and peering outside into the rain. Perhaps Gigi was right and he simply needed a change of scenery. It had worked for Gigi, after all. Maybe it would work for Luciano, too. A change of scenery, a change of pace. There were plenty of places to be a barista. There were new places to craft a new, better Luciano. The rain washed away the city dust, frothing in puddles on the smooth stones.
Gradually, he became aware of soft footfalls behind him. They halted. The busy sounds of the patrons’ free conversation, the grind and bustle of fresh coffee being made and served, the nearly imperceptible but constant sighs and creaks of the old building, with the imprint of age in the mortar and brick – all of it sloshed around, putting heavy pressure on Luciano’s eardrums. Somewhere in the distance, the front door opened and closed heavily. And then, suddenly, a warm hand rested on his shoulder. The firm touch was comforting, sending a heady rush of intoxicating relief through Luciano’s body, until he was tingling from the crown of his head to the tips of his fingers. The heavy cloud around him was no longer as dense, promptly pierced by the sharp sour scent of coffee and wine as Gigi’s voice curled in his ear, a precious if consequential tendril of comfort.
For a small while then, there was no more sound.