‘Florentine women are trained to be indecipherable-what you don’t know, they say, will ultimately charm you,’ Paola told us. Broad grins are a sign of weakness and easy-to-read ladies from overseas are often perceived as too loose in their likings. In her own orb and to those she most treasures, the Florentine lady will shine with incontestable appeal. Detachment is the key to seduction and affection, like affluence, is best reserved for the few and far between. Love, Paola says, must be unlocked selectively.
Her ideas are not new to me. The Florentines will amuse you, tempt you to scold them, convince you to grin and surround you with all things great and gorgeous. But they are not generally known for giving their hearts away with ease. Often interpreted as arrogance, their emotional reserve is a carefully learned skill. And at safe times-when all doors are closed and all stomachs are full and the autumn glow of indoor talk cracks secrets open like roasted chestnuts, I ask more about it. But only then. Hunting has its proper season, even reason-hunting and, cultural temperaments should only be tampered with when no one’s bearing arms.
In everyday Italy, water must be made to slide easily off one’s back and a sense of humor has to become as easy to spend as spare change.
Only in very safe places, like a rented mountain house where fires get built and wool gets worn, can one delve into the core of all questions. Filippo’s childhood friend Tommaso came up with his wife Paola last weekend and in that house-whose walls are thick enough to bear it-we talked freely about the things one only says when there’s time: which side of whose family produced both saints and sinners, which neighborhood district is really going to the dogs and which secret things about Italian living make me tired sometimes. And no one told me to go back home or to buck up and shut up. They simply sat and thought and gave good answers-or least answers, right or wrong, as they soon may prove to be.
‘I get tired of having no Italian women friends,’ I said with a sudden air of unwanted sadness, that made Filippo reach over to squeeze my shoulder-for he knows how I ache at times for the brand of female camaraderie that’s more readily available in the Anglo world.
‘And what am I, the sole of a shoe?’ Paola protested.
‘You? You’re an exception. And even with you-as great as you are-it took you about a year to like me and at least one thousand more to trust me.’
‘How mean of you to remember!’ she laughed. ‘Americans trust everyone, Linda. And make a best friend out of the lady beside them on the bus. Italians trust no one. And it’s a weakness in both cases.’
‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘But at least, in the US, we’re not scanned from head to toe every time we cross a threshold. I can’t count the times, I get sized up on a given day.’
‘Beh. We can’t really help that. It’s not exactly a conscious act. Italians just zero in without thinking about it.
But, that’s tiring too, you know. Routinely determining others strengths and weaknesses and measuring them up against your own.’
‘So why do you do it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe we’re just naturally human calculators.’
‘But, Italians are known throughout the world as being a purely instinctive race.’
She shook her head. ‘No. First, you have to find where the advantage lies. We’re really only instinctive after we’ve done the math.’
Then she stopped and for a moment we both sat quiet in thought, until Tommaso interrupted our silence with a shrug.
‘We’re not such bad people, though,’ he said in very much the same way one refuses to cry over spilt milk. ‘We may calculate, but all we truly want is comfort. Smart people with a very foolish goal-that’s what we are.’
Whether his affirmation was amused or resigned escaped me. He just said it, with the tone an English speaker would use to speak of rain on a day in November. And with that, he broadened the scope of our controversy, for two women questioning the origins of their inclinations make Italian men infinitely nervous. Tommaso wanted to talk more about love in general, not friendship, specifically, and he made his point by saying that the Florentines perceive love in much the same way they see money. It has either been in the family for generations or it’s pinched like pennies and spent as warily. People don’t give their feelings away unguarded-unlimited access puts one’s personal commodities at horrible risk. A twelfth century battle, he says, forced them to be on guard and they’ve never lost the habit. Modern-day mass tourism, too, has done little to curb the constant fear of being invaded.
For Filippo, whose mother was a southerner, central Italians consider love a question of pre-meditated desire-a well-weighed individual choice, not a hasty artless emotion. In Italy’s south, love is either an unforeseeable mishap or the lovely result of the Fates’ generosity-never a purely conscious decision. The same is not true for the Florentines, he says. Their fondness is much more tightfisted, at least at first.
‘I’m not at all happy with the idea of love being like money,’ I told my friends. ‘It’s a horrible metaphor. Money never quite lasts ‘til the end of the month and, most times, it’s too hard-earned to be worth it.’
‘You forget,’ Filippo scolded, with the beginning of a grin, ‘that the Florentines invented banking. Love is a lot like paying by credit. It never feels like you’re spending as much as you actually are.’
The men laughed together at the cleverness of his remark, looking very much like school boys who’d somehow outsmarted the teacher. Paola caught my eye with a slightly suppressed smile. As I matched it, hers widened and a new form of complicity sprouted between us. We did love them, I suppose, by credit, by loan and very much with interest. Credit is just something that women understand, no matter their nation of origin.
