Читать книгу In Maremma - David Leavitt - Страница 10

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OF ALL THE craftsmen who worked on Podere Fiume, the most entertaining was Pepe, the blacksmith. He was a short, chubby, balding, and slightly foppish Roman—he had been known to wear an ascot even while soldering—who always seemed as rumpled and stale as if he had just come off a long-haul flight. In a single sentence he could tell you about the giardino d’inverno (winter garden) he had built for the designer Valentino and lament that he had not had una bella cagarella (a good shit) in ages.

Pepe was a fixture at a certain bar on Via Cavour, not far from his studio near Trajan’s Forum, and there he insisted on buying a coffee for each and every friend of his who happened to walk in or whom he might have chanced to encounter and co-opt on the way. Each of his visits—and he made no fewer than five of them a day—cost him a minimum of fifteen thousand lire. So that he would not need to have cash on him always, he kept an account at the bar and settled it once a month. Pepe’s minimum of fifteen thousand lire a day came to two and a quarter million lire a month. Multiplied by twelve, one calculates that Pepe spent fifteen thousand dollars a year on coffee.

Like all true artisans, Pepe was self-dramatizing. His work, he would say, was not like anyone else’s. Although certain things might look simple, such as the wrought-iron brackets for the curtain rods, they required enormous effort and concentration to make. For this reason, he could hardly be expected to work more than two or three hours a day: only an automaton could work eight or ten hours a day. If lunch was particularly satisfying, perhaps he would be able to put in another half hour’s work during the afternoon. In any case, he must have a short rest first.

Still, in six months, he managed to complete all our iron work: grates for the downstairs windows, three sets of doors, arched doors for a winter garden, railings for the stairs (a design copied from a terrace on a crumbling building in the Monti neighborhood of Rome), and finally, the curtain brackets and rods. Although Sauro and his assistants, Giampaolo and Fabio, were able to install the window grates and doors, Pepe insisted that he had to come up to install the railing himself.

We duly set Pepe up at an agriturismo run by Sauro’s cousin, but it would not do for him. Instead he decamped to the Locanda la Pieve, Semproniano’s one hotel, where all of his meals could be—and were—placed on account. (At the agriturismo, only breakfast was provided.) During the three days he was there, he worked a total of eight hours. Because Sauro and his crew put in a good ten hours a day, five (and sometimes six) days a week, they did not quite know what to make of Pepe and his ascots. They concluded that he was simply un personaggio (a character).