Lo Svedese

He was there again.

It had snowed the night before. A ‘shooting snow’. That took farm workers from their beds to light torches amongst the vines, and hunters from their duvets early, in search of the fresh tracks of warm bodies looking for berries in the early morning light. And now the hunters were in, propping up the bar and testing her reserves of cherry wine and her patience with their bellowed “saluti”s and worn tales of Mario Pepe, the fabled wild boar the size of a Fiat, “eyes like the hottest place in hell,” and Lorenzo’s brush with death in the frigid Pesa. “Thought I’d lose my balls to the ice”, he cries. And they laugh. Roar. As though this was the first recounting. Hot breath filling the rough-plastered walls with the aroma of fortified wine and rolled sigarette, as lunchtime’s rich peposo arrived on steam from the kitchen to tempt the belly and huff up the windows looking onto the snow-covered square. And it was hot. And it was suffocating. And it was too loud and too warm and too much and not enough. Signora Baldi let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Heavy. And paused polishing what was possibly the cleanest glass in all of Chianti. The glassware of Enoteca Baldi was always spotless on mornings like these, her tea-towel used as a sort of armoured ‘I’m extremely busy’ shield to avoid getting drawn into conversation with the old bastards. Fifty three years in this village. Amongst these men. Behind this bar. She placed the glass back on the shelf and turned towards the window.

They could have been anywhere. Three millimetres of condensation-clouded glass stood between her and the iced world behind. Quiet. Blue. Cast adrift on winter. Signora Baldi pulled the sleeve of her cardigan down over her hand and wiped a small circle in the pane. She could feel the cold through the wool, and for an irresistible moment felt like putting her cheek against the pane. To feel the ice against her skin. She lent forward.

    And saw him.

Across the road. Sitting patiently under the lecci tree.

Che palle. She’d be damned if she was going to have a customer freeze to death at one of her tables. There was nothing for it but to make her way to the door, pressing past the hulking uomini and their salacious remarks, while quietly cursing the man and the dog in the square and, yes, taking it as something of a personal insult actually. Why not come in to order, for god’s sake? Hat. Coat. Signora Baldi flung open the front door of the enoteca and emerged onto the step where she made a great show of wrapping her scarf around her neck three times in a way that said, “look. Look how I struggle,” to her audience of two. With a final flourish she pulled her coat about her, to really underline the effort it had taken - the great favour she was doing - to serve the fool. She stepped onto the pavement into…

Silence. 

Snow silence. From somewhere in the woods a jay called, its single cry only serving to draw attention to the otherwise blanket absence of sound. It would snow again soon. She could feel it in the air. Clouds hung low and pregnant above the village at the top of the hill. A held breath. Mio Dio. There he was. The hardest winter in 30 years, and where does he sit? Outside. Same table, same chair, 7 inches of snow around his ankles. Man and dog, for all the world a couple of tourists on a warm summers day.

L’Inglese. The Englishman. He had arrived sometime in August. The height of silly season, when no one could move for bloody tourists and Hitler himself could have passed unnoticed amongst the bustle. But soon the crowds had thinned. And the days had passed. The weeks. Until it had dawned on the Signora that, every day at the same time, the same man would come and sit at the same table on the same chair beneath the same lecci tree. It was a good position; set slightly back from the other customers, and sheltered from the sun by the shifting shade of oak leaves rather than her umbrellas. A Campari, always, for him. A bowl of water for his mangy dog, who insisted on occupying the chair next to him, sat right up at the table like a human – as though it was the most natural thing in the world, for goodness’ sake. And from this vantage point they would simply sit, stringing out their €5 order, watching life pass about them in the small piazza. The odd car passing by. Dario the butcher closing (early) for lunch. The Bianchi boys playing in the fountain.

A bitter wind found its way through a gap in Signora Baldi’s scarf. The Englishman. He was a puzzle. And as anyone could tell you, Signora Baldi didn’t trust things she couldn’t understand. The Firenze Santa Maria Novella bus timetable? Unlike others, that was something she could get to the bottom of. But here was a mystery the no one could solve; a man who appeared every day, ordered the same thing, then quietly disappeared back to wherever it was he came from. She could see him quite clearly now. He was perhaps half way through his life, and yet all of the seasons, all years, were visible in his face. Time seemed to move differently around him. As though his life had frozen at some point.

And he hadn’t even been English to start with.

Lo Svedese. That’s what she called him. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Quiet and well mannered. Reserved, even. And tall. Swedish, clearly. And if he hadn’t gone and visited the post office to renew his visa, handing Signora Brambilla a British passport, of all things, Lo Svedese he would have stayed. And yes, there may be an argument to say that it wasn’t his fault he was English, but it had made Signora Baldi feel silly. And now of course it was one of the village’s great jokes and would remain so until the day she died. And over time she had taken to simply arriving with their drinks, placing the dog’s bowl right on the table. “Grazie mille,” he would say from beneath his battered hat, sitting and watching, lost somewhere between here and the past.

Signora’s boots crunched in the snow. Creak. “Hmmm. The same sound her as her knees,” thought the dog, who very much looked forward to seeing this nice lady every day. She smelled of liver and beeswax floor polish and would hand him small scraps of prosciutto, or maybe a little salami, when no one was looking, her hand slightly open behind her as she set the drinks on the table. But today: something different. No drinks. The lady had forgotten.

The Englishman looked up and smiled. A question. For the first time in their near wordless six month relationship, Signora Baldi had arrived at his table without their drinks. In fact it was only as she bent to serve them that she realised she wasn’t holding anything in her hands. And in that same moment she realised that she’d been driven by a feeling so overwhelmingly hurtful that she had to almost physically swallow it back down. It was maternal. Something in her Italian conscience couldn’t let her serve cold Campari and an iced bowl of water to these two fools on a minus two degree morning in the snow. She had little English, and the Englishman not much more Italian, but Signora Baldi had world class gesticulations. Would he like a bamaba, maybe? A bombardino? No? A cherry wine, then. Anything to warm the daft boy up. 

“No grazie,” he smiled, “uno Campari per favore. Grazie. Mille.” 

Signora Baldi threw her hands up in shrugged despair and turned. Che idiota. What more could one do? If he wanted to die from il colpo d’aria, so be it. The English were madder than any of them could have imagined.

“Lo Svedese wants an aperitivo,” she announced to the bar as she returned, much to the merriment of the hunters. “No herrings?” They laughed. “He’ll lose his balls to the ice just like Lorenzo!” “The two eunuchi of Panzano!” 

Signora Baldi took down the bottle of brilliant red bitter liqueur, threw a handful of ice into a tumbler, and poured. Some soda. A slice of orange. She considered leaving the ice cubes from the dog’s water, but would he miss them? A small dish of tarallini then, still slightly warm from the oven. And into her pocket, a few scraps of salami. 

Outside, the first few flakes had begun to fall. The temperature had dropped, and the dog’s nosed twitched. Charcuterie was approaching. He sat up, scruffy tail beginning to wag, as his dear friend appeared, the holiday clink of ice cubes announcing her arrival at their table. Allora. Signora Baldi set down the tray and handed L’Inglese his drink. Just as he reached out to take it. And quite accidentally, their hands touched. For just under a second, skin touched skin. And it should have been mortifying. Unbearably intimate. And yet. “É bello qui,” The Englishman said, gesturing to the view before them. And somehow the moment had passed with ease. It was indeed beautiful. Still and white. Warm lights in every window in the village. A thin fragrant steam rising from the bakery set slightly up the hill from the square. Fountain frozen in time, water turned to icicles mid-fall. Funny how it takes a stranger to make you look at your own home properly. Signora Baldi chanced a look at the young man beside her. When was the last time that someone had touched her? Somehow, the barrier of communication between them had broken. She felt easy in his company. And so she stayed a while. The flakes falling harder now.

Until she remembered herself. She couldn’t be hanging around here forever. She had a bar to run. And as if on queue, the sound of a glass smashing inside her enoteca broke the spell. Quegli bastardi! As she pulled open the door of the bar light and heat and raucous noise spilled out. In the fading light of the square, two figures sat beneath the lecci tree. A man. A dog. Two drinks.