Roberto Falcone has my father’s same name, but our family ties end there, for we are not even remotely blood related. In fact, our surname is our sole similarity. He’s a brilliant researcher who writes chemical equations while doodling on the phone, and every scrap of paper in his house has Latin poetry printed on the flip side.
Conversely, the only formula chimica I know is ‘chemical imbalance,’ and as far as ancient poems are concerned, I can quote only those verses short enough to fit inside Baci Perugina chocolates. Odi et ami is my favorite. Three little words explain 20 centuries’ worth of romantic drama.
For a while, Roberto and I lived in the same building. His doorbell said ‘Falcone’ and mine bore the name of the owner’s aging aunt, so Roberto became stairwell friends with all my guests. ‘For Linda, you have to ring the zia,’ he’d explain jovially. And the fact that both he and I found that funny beyond measure made us very good temporary neighbors.
I stayed in that flat for nine months-not long enough to change the doorbell name and certainly not long enough to convince Roberto that my father’s family was from Genoa not Sicily. Since then, I’ve moved three blocks away and still find him on the street sometimes, always in a rush to pick up his four children or leave them off someplace educational. Either way, lateness is their way of life. Without Livia, his youngest, most responsible daughter, he would not remember which day which child is supposed to be where.
Four-year-olds are so good, he says, and much more reliable than iPhones when it comes to retaining schedule information.
Last week we ran into each other-quite literally: me trying to keep my street-bought umbrella from flipping upside down and Roberto struggling to keep Livia from being splashed on by her stomping older brother.
‘Piove di brutto, eh?’ he said as hello.
‘Yes, I can’t take it anymore.’
Roberto grinned. ‘You know what they say, ‘piove, governo ladro’.
‘Why? Because they’ve stolen the blue sky, too?’
‘Giusto,’ he laughed. ‘Ma, have you become a cynic since I’ve last seen you?’
‘Do you know anyone who can avoid it after two months of rain?’
‘I don’t know, are you metereopatica?’
I frowned, trying to hear through the wind, ‘Metereo-what?’
‘Do you feel things, based on the weather?’
Livia took hold of my hand as he asked this, and her gesture made me immediately happy. I shrugged in response. ‘My mood changes for all sorts of things. It wouldn’t hurt to put the weather in there as well.’
The bimba found our talk boring and did her best to interrupt off topic. ‘Do you like pesci rossi?’ she asked.
Italians call goldfish ‘red fish’. Sixty days of non-stop water and there’s nothing to discuss besides aquatic pets. But no, I don’t like the poor misnamed creatures at all. ‘Yes,’ I answered, feigning enthusiasm, ‘they’re really neat.’
‘We flushed ours down the toilet,’ she told me in her show-and-tell voice.
‘Ah.’
Roberto laughed. ‘The fish was metereopatico. Died of fish bowl depression.’
With that, Livia lost interest again and dropped my hand. Her brother had found a reasonably sized puddle up ahead, and prissy though she was, she wanted a part in it.
‘Are you going to tell me why the government’s a thief when it rains?’
I reminded him. Roberto knows I like language things.
‘You mean, you don’t know?’
‘No, I just thought it’s so that politicians can be blamed every day.’
‘The government used to have a monopoly on selling salt,’ he explained, ‘and they’d dole it out on wet days so that it would weigh more-after having absorbed the rainwater.’
I nodded. ‘Hmm. That’s new.’
‘No,’ he shook his head, ‘It just proves that the government has always been thieving-since time immemorial. Nihil novi sub sole.’
I let the Latin reference slide without comment. One should never encourage an already pathological habit. Besides, Livia was back again.
‘Livy, do you know what we say in English, when it’s pouring?’ She’d earned a ‘Very Good’ in preschool Inglese and liked to show off her worksheets with numbers and colors.
‘What?’
‘Sometimes, when it rains very hard, it rains ‘cats and dogs.”
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
The little girl turned to the oldest Falcone on site-that sucker of her father. ‘When it rains like that here, Papà, can we go out and get a puppy?’
Brava, Livia. That’s the way. Never mind about ‘very good.’ Sei fantastica.
There was not a ray of sunlight in sight. But the weather was suddenly splendid for Roberto and me and all those who are weather sensitive.
