The charm, warmth, and generosity towards visitors exhibited by a Venetian café owner and his wife are commemorated here by novelist Michelle Lovric.
In the twelve years’ I’d known him, I’d never seen Emilio’s legs.
His superb big face squeezed up in greeting, yes. His teddy-bear torso drum-tight under his apron, every day. His colossal hands hovering like a priest’s, yes, every morning. But his legs ― no, never.
Emilio’s post is behind the bar at his sparkling Gaggia, one eye on the suspended television screen, just in case something resembling a ball hoves into view. The entire bar da Gino is decorated in the patriotic azzuro, the walls studded with football memorabilia. His staff wear uniforms in the same colours.
Emilio’s wife Graziella serves. She is shy, slight and strawberry-blonde, with a ladylike delicacy that belies her brutal working hours. The Scarpa family live on terrafirma. Their day starts at 4am. Six days a week, the bar opens at 6am and closes around 8pm. Then the family Scarpa cleans it lovingly, and makes the long journey home by foot, vaporetto, bus and foot again.
‘Un bel cappuccino per la Michelle,’ rumbles Emilio from the depths of his big blue heart. Emilio Scarpa prides himself on knowing the preferences of all his regulars. La Michelle likes a cappuccino con poca schiuma ― a flat coffee nestling under a light down of dove-coloured foam calligraphed in Emilio’s signature burnt-umber arabesque swirl.
The following has been tested: an informed stranger may come to Emilio’s bar and ask for a ‘cappuccino tipo Michelle,’ and get same. […]
Only the tourists go to Gino’s simply for the coffee, and utterly missing most of the point of the place. Like any proper Italian bar, da Gino dispenses a stronger sustenance. It’s not just Graziella’s nutritious smile, or Fabrizio’s serious concern for every little thing. In the breaks between rabid over-writing and savage cutting, I’ve made friendships at my aluminium table that have been broken only by death. Like my friend Angelo the retired gondolier (un espresso) who used to arrive at 6am with a small packet of birdseed and an endless supply of seduction-flavoured chat. Every morning we used to share a dozen cigarettes (him actively, me passively) and coffee.
One morning I came rushing in to Gino’s, drenched, from one of Venice’s apocalyptic electrical storms.
I gasped, ‘The builders’ crane at San Vidal got struck by lightning!’
Angelo looked blank and insisted that he had never seen the crane.
‘But you must have,’ I protested, ‘It’s huge! It’s just over the Accademia Bridge. You can almost see it from here.’
He answered: ‘Ma Michelle, io non guardo mai sopra perché le donne non volano,’― ‘I never look up, because women don't fly.’
He used to ask me about what kind of novel I was writing: he’d give me two alternatives to choose from, with all the appropriate gestures: either ‘kiss-kiss’ or ‘boom-boom’ (pistol shots). I had to say that there was more kiss-kiss than boom-boom in my novels and this seemed to please Angelo quite a lot. I still miss him, and his box of canary-feed, and even those damnable cigarettes. He’d frequently told me that he wanted to go to hell when he died, because all the interesting women ― Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale & co ― would be down there, and better still, he’d grin, ‘completamente nude!’ because their clothes would have been burnt off in Purgatory.
We had another loss this year. Bart and Marilyn (un cappuccino ― ma caldo caldo) were of that breed of sophisticated, urbane Americans who still adorn Venice like Henry James in his time. Bart and Marilyn were Gino’s stalwarts, breakfasting there all summer. In the winter I emailed them Gino-bulletins: about Valentina’s twins, about Fabrizio’s daughter, about the night Italy won the world cup and Emilio nearly died of joy.
Bart died in January. Marilyn had no appetite for life without him and dwindled, losing nothing of her Southern grace, until she too was gone. I wrote to Emilio and Graziella to tell them the sad news: for a little while I could not bear to go to Gino’s, because I knew I would cry when I saw them. Then I realized how stupid that was. I went. And I cried. And it was good.
Marilyn had instructed that some of her ashes were to be scattered in Venice. Her daughter brought them from New York. We knelt at our jetty scattering them in the Grand Canal along with the petals of two dozen peach-coloured roses. It was an ebb tide. A few minutes later the petals, and Marilyn, would have been passing by Gino’s.
Then I took Marilyn’s daughter to meet Emilio and Graziella, whose hospitality had meant so much to her parents.
And that was how I came to see Emilio’s legs. I’d told him the day before of our plans. On seeing us arrive with our stricken faces and a girl who was a young facsimile of his beloved and now departed customer, Emilio turned down the lever of the Gaggia, wiped his hands on his apron, and came out from behind the bar.
He took the hand of Marilyn’s daughter and, with me translating, for ten minutes told her the most beautiful things she had ever heard about her mother.
Then he wiped his eyes and went back behind the bar and executed three flawless cappuccini tipo Michelle.
Michelle Lovric, ‘Emilio’s legs’
Michelle Lovric and over fifty other writers appear in city-pick Venice, £8.99 paperback, published by Oxygen Books on 4 November 2010.
