Scenes From an Italian Restaurant II
Harriet Gilbert Savage
On finding the everyday magic
“Do you have sunshine today?” an abrupt enquiry illuminates my phone. “It is - 4° at home and - 22° in one place in Scotland!”, my mother continues, with an indignant disbelief.
I sit outside my coffee shop, reluctant to accept that Rome is acquainted with the concept of coldness. Dusty shafts of sunlight bleed between the buildings, warming the spots they kiss; although they are not yet mature enough to banish the bitter chill from the shadow-strewn streets. I unwittingly engage in a battle with the brutal breeze, racing to gulp down my coffee before the wind whips away all of its warmth. I was destined for defeat, though, my haste transforms the coffee’s silkiness into sickliness; the satisfaction seeps away.
Last week, the usual gaggle of graffiti that dominates the church’s walls was silenced, muffled by a fresh slick of paint. A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth as a rebellion rises against the conservatism of the pristine coat: spindly branches of polyglot musings have already begun to sprout. Some comfort: ‘todo lo esencial es invisible antes los ojos’, some caution: ‘però che non dici cazzate’. They cling to the walls, determined to resist further uprooting. Puddles plague the pavement, a vestige of the cruel deceit of the sky. Because even if that sherbetty blue is untainted by a single plume of cloud, great torrents of rain will still taunt the tentative spring. Two wooden seats lie just beyond the entrance of the church, their worn wood holding a loose impression of their regulars. The two familiar faces sit down, relaxing into the predictable patterns and rhythms of their sleepy Sunday ritual. Yet rather than offerings of sticky pastries and peppy coffee, the bartender – face plastered with a gleeful grin – showers them in cascades of technicolour confetti, her giggles peppered with cries of ‘Carnivale! Carnivale!’
And a certain uncertainty skips through the hazy sunbeams, the air holds an unpredictability, an anticipation.
In his Viaggio in Italia, Goethe presents his almost perplexed observations of Carnivale: ‘at a given signal, everyone has leave to be as mad and as foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except fisticuffs and stabbing, is permissible.’ A period in which troubles and worries are banished to the world of tomorrow, and seriousness and sensibility are discarded at the door. Its legacy is painted with great strokes of romanticised wickedness; masquerade balls concealed scandalous love affairs and illicit con-schemes. With the passage of time its scenes have shrunk into vignettes of surprise, of trickery, of mischief; yet its light-heartedness - the essence of Carnevale - remains etched into the refrain: ‘a Carnevale ogni scherzo vale, e chi si offende è un gran maiale!’
That careless attitude of ‘anything goes’, however, seems a hollow promise as our days and nights are regimented by restrictions. Boundless possibilities seem incomprehensible, nothing more than a foolish fantasy.
My daydreams are disrupted by the sound of scraping chairs. A couple sneak their seats away from the shadows to the sun-drenched side of the street. They sit in a contented silence, enjoying the nearness of one another. The waiter halts his frenzied course, pausing to pet the wonderfully doe-eyed puppy that lolls beneath her owner’s chair. Children are dressed in their carnival finery, ribbons and capes flail behind them as they weave manic trails around the square. I look around and see that the everyday magic is still here, even if it is a little harder to find. But, like all the best treasure hunts, the prizes hardest to find are more often than not the most gratifying, the most rewarding.
Instead of taunting ourselves with the Carnivale delusion that ‘anything is possible’, perhaps we might ask ‘what is possible?’. We can still walk on the sunny side of the road, and put our pyjamas on the radiator so they are perfectly toasty for bedtime. We can light that candle that we’ve been saving for best because we deserve to be drenched in delicious smells every day of the week. And we can most definitely take a break from work to dance in our pants to that song that just won’t get out of our heads (the books won’t go anywhere, I promise). Drink hot chocolate for breakfast (the French do it and they still have teeth left). Go and watch the sunset, go and watch the sunrise if you’re that particular breed of alarmingly spritely morning person. And of course, none of our worries will magically dissolve away, but they might just seem a little less daunting.