Sentimental Economy Page 2

  We’d been friends for ages.

  He was older than me by seven years, but he lived on Piazza del Collegio, where I went to school, and he was a regular at the café across the street from the school, as well as a regular pinball wizard, and when Rossetti and other friends and I decided to put on a little student production in the school auditorium, well there was Bernabei, watching the rehearsals. Since he already had whiskers, we looked around, ready to tell him that he couldn’t be here, but we had a chat before he left and next thing you know, we’d become friends, and friends we remained for the next forty years, and it would be hard to imagine a more loyal, sincere, and good-hearted friend.

  He was notorious in the city of Prato for the rather unique relationship he had with money, so much so that he was universally known as Count Mascetti, the character played by Ugo Tognazzi in Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), the penniless aristocrat who’d run through his own estate and his wife’s money as well, and then went on his honeymoon accompanied by a brown bear on a leash. Those who knew Bernabei well, though, understood that he was more of a Mascetti than Mascetti himself. After all, even though he’d never been wealthy—in fact, had always been poor—Bernabei invariably squandered what little he occasionally managed to earn with the same passion and verve as the legendary count, and if he had anything in common with Mascetti, it was the refined sartorial elegance he unfailingly showed off every single day, in particular his ability to use bright colors in his attire without ever seeming garish—especially notable was his gift for mixing and matching those colors.

  He was fond of eating well and drinking well, and he never missed a single one of our Thursday evening dinners. He was fond of women, and had been married twice, but he’d been unable to make either of those marriages last.

  Numerous are the legends retailed about him, for the most part unsubstantiated and destined to remain exactly that: legends. Among the best known is this one: sometime in the eighties, a TG1 television news crew had apparently discovered the existence of Prato, and one morning they arrived in the center of the city to get some footage and do some interviews, but found no one in sight because back then, in the morning hours, the citizens of Prato were all at work. It wasn’t until noon that they finally spotted one denizen of Prato: none other than Bernabei, who’d just woken up and was dragging himself down the Corso Mazzoni in search of his first espresso of the day.

  “You, sir, must be the only person in Prato who doesn’t work. Why is that?” they asked him.

  And he replied, without batting an eyelash: “Work? I don’t have the time.”

  Not that Fabio had ever actually tried working, but at a certain point he and work must have nevertheless concluded that they were mutually incompatible, and decided to part ways, remaining good friends as before, but agreeing never to frequent each other again.

  To me, Bernabei was a symbol of the idea that it was possible to live another life, that it wasn’t really all that necessary to struggle every day of your life to produce and earn, and that freedom was the most important thing of all, more important than pride, infinitely more important than money. Of course, you’d have to be put together the way he was.

  His funeral, too, was different from other people’s funerals. To spend as little as possible, his brother had decided to have him buried without a Mass or any ceremony, without even summoning a priest to say a prayer, and so the thirty or so masked individuals who’d come to the cemetery and had scattered out among the cypress trees in observance of social distancing only to witness from afar the unloading of Fabio’s coffin from the hearse and the prompt lowering of same into a hole in the ground thought exactly the same thing that a woman standing beside me must have thought, because she spoke up immediately after witnessing that disgrace: “No! Poor guy!”

  Then a gravedigger climbed up onto a small steam shovel and began plunging the scoop bucket into that pile of soft, fresh soil and dropping it into the grave. My friends and I ventured closer and stood there watching the coffin being covered with dirt, until another gravedigger showed up carrying a wooden cross inscribed with his name, misspelled—FABIO ABERTO BERNABEI, instead of ALBERTO—jammed it into the ground, and left.

  All done. The ceremony was over.

  The shortest funeral I’d ever attended had just ended, and we were all standing there gazing in astonishment at that heap of dirt and the cross when I felt someone touch the collar of my jacket—I had decided to dress like Fabio for his funeral: light-colored trousers, an oversized dress shirt, untucked, a navy blue blazer, a pair of brown Ferragamo shoes, quite flashy and elaborate, that someone had given me as a gift but which I’d never had the nerve to wear before: I knew that Fabio would have appreciated them. Last of all, a brightly colored Carpini scarf that I’d tucked into my breast pocket in an awkward attempt to pay homage to my friend who had just left this life, alone and in silence, unexpectedly, of a heart attack, in the midst of a pandemic, somehow dodging the threat of a respiratory disease in spite of the tens of thousands of cigarettes he’d smoked, not even a mile away from my house as the crow flies, carried off by a sudden but all things considered merciful death. And when I turn around, I find myself face-to-face with Bernabei’s brother, the very one who’d planned out the infamous details of that funeral, the short, stout man in his early seventies wearing a polo shirt and a sleeveless red jacket whom I’d overheard explaining to the first Signora Bernabei that he’d chosen not to summon a priest so that he wouldn’t waste people’s time, and I was just a scant second away from picking him up by the seat of his trousers and heaving him into the grave alongside Fabio. Anyway, he told me, “I just straightened up the collar of your jacket.”

  As Soon as the Quarantine Is Over

  At the beginning of May, the quarantine ends and we’re allowed to leave our homes without our self-certification: I saved two of those documents, and maybe I’ll have them framed, as a souvenir of living through a time when I needed to carry with me a sort of signed justification that I could show to the police in case they stopped me and asked where I was going and why. While in one I wrote, “I’m going to Pisa airport to pick up my daughter Angelica,” in the other one I may have gone a little overboard, but still it was all true, and clearly that day I must have been upset: “I’m going to the pharmacy to get life-saving pharmaceuticals for my ailing mother.”

  Shops and cafés and restaurants and museums and parks all reopen, and we recover the freedom to do more or less as we please, but only a very few, chiefly the younger folks, hurry to avail themselves of that freedom, staying out until late in the piazzas and streets, giddy with joy at once again being able to do the tender, terrible things that young people do, indifferent to the fears and scoldings of their elders, who never tire of warning them to continue to take care because, as the television obsessively and awkwardly repeats, “This isn’t the time to lower our guard,” as if we’d all become fencers or boxers.

  Then I, too, start leaving the house. I go back to having breakfast at Bar Perugia, I go out to dinner at Angiolo Barni’s restaurant, and my friends and I raise a toast to Bernabei. One time I even went as far as Forte dei Marmi to take a look at the beach and the sea and the empty sky with Genova and Roberto Santini.

  But it’s not like it used to be. It’s not even remotely like it used to be, for anyone. So one especially empty, disconcerting afternoon I go to visit the Mage.

  He greets me masked, because that’s the way things go in these miserable days: from one precaution to another, from one fear to another, even greater fear, and no one hugs, no one shakes hands, not even we do, even though we’ve been friends since we were kids.

  He shows me his warehouse, crowded with pallets piled high with bolts of fabric that he still can’t ship to his customers.

  “That ruby-red bouclé with the astrakhan facing goes to Fuchs & Schmitt, in Aschaffenburg,” says the Mage, as Alberto Magelli is known. He smiles because he knows
that Fuchs & Schmitt was a customer of mine, a thousand years ago, and that I had gone to pay calls on them more than once, in that charming and tidy little town that is frequently referred to, though who knows why, as the “Nice of Bavaria.” “That camel hair broadcloth, on the other hand, goes to Japan…”

  Broadcloth! It had been years since I’d last thought of that ancient fabric, so unfailingly elegant, which I’ve always loved for the way it has of being both soft and spare, but also compact, even shiny, thanks to its short and perfectly flat pile that you’d expect to get roughed up the first time you touch it, to the point of twisting into a bout of pilling, but it doesn’t because the Mage has flattened his “drap,” his broadcloth—and rightly so, necessarily so—that is to say, he’s kept it wrapped around a roll, spinning, for two full days at the end of all the processing, somehow, who can say how (gravity must have something to do with it, or alchemy, or both), acquiring that stability of appearance that will allow the customer to wear the overcoat made of that broadcloth for years and years without it ever looking worn or threadbare.

  He then points out patterned jacket fabrics, flannels, velours, and a separable double-faced electric blue fabric that’s destined for Belgium, for Scapa, another former customer of mine, whom I also used to sell a separable double-faced fabric. It was a miniature wonder of compound weaving, made up of two fabrics held together in a stitched frame that could, if desired, be separated, so as to give it a freer, looser feel. (I know that “freer, looser feel” might sound like a vague way to describe the qualities of a fabric, but in the textiles industry, that’s just the way we talk.)

  He still makes exactly what we used to make, the Mage. He makes wool. Classic apparel. Overcoats. I’m surprised.

  “What kind of a price do you get for this stuff?”

  “Well, it depends. Anywhere from twelve to sixteen euros a meter.”

  “Really?” I ask in astonishment. “That much?”

  “If they pay me,” he jokes, and then he heads up the stairs, toward his office.

  The offices are small, but tastefully, and recently, furnished—blond wood floors, bright walls, black-and-white photographs of textile-related subjects artistically out of focus, a row of vintage bowling pins set up at the end of the office hallway, large Apple monitors dominating every desk, a slogan written in flowing script with flourishes and curlicues on the wall of the sample room, decreeing in English that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

  He showed me a promotional video that features him walking through these offices, discussing fabrics with the women who work for him. At a certain point we see him framed, smiling broadly, in a wide close-up, in a navy blue jacket with a white open-necked shirt, saying things like: It always touches me deeply to think about how this adventure in my life first came about and where I’ve arrived now. And then: I’m in love with the work I do. And then, again: The evenings I spend with my customers, when in the end you start talking about any old thing, things that have nothing to do with work, are the times I love best, because you open up, everyone says what they think, you relax, and you find yourself speaking the truth, letting out what you really feel inside.

  I’m captivated as I watch that perfect identification of life with work, something that, when I worked for the family company, I’d never been able to achieve.

  For me, going to work meant ceasing to be one person and becoming another: starting to think differently, talk differently, behave differently, even dress differently. Sometimes, while I was in the car on my short drive between home and office, it seemed as if I could feel it physically, that transformation, like the Incredible Hulk.

  But for the Mage, work is life, and his company, La Torre, is a self-portrait. Since his father hadn’t been in the business, he’d started at the bottom, so much so that the first thing he was told to do, on his first day working as an apprentice technician, was to paint his own office. After that, over time, with hard work, commitment, and passion, he became a full-fledged technician, and in time head technician and then sales executive. He came to the conclusion that it was a good idea to invest every ounce of energy and enthusiasm he could muster in the textile industry, focusing on design and production done in Italy. He was confident he’d be successful.

  And so, in 2003, just a year before I sold my company, as I sat fearfully awaiting the impending Armageddon of my woolen mill and of the Italian textiles industry at large, the Mage went to his boss and purchased 20 percent of the stock of the woolen mill where he worked, signing a further commitment to take over the rest of the company at a later date.

  His approach to the textile business is a clever one, capable of taking inspiration from the great fabrics of the past, but without slavishly copying them, because this is no longer the time for that mediumistic, visionary concept of fashion as the spirit of beauty that descends from the sky, embodying itself in a fabric, à la Sergio Vari. What the Mage espoused instead was an intelligent and deeply commercial textile industry, stripped of the patina of nostalgia, devoid of ambition and manufacturing challenges, delivered on time and at a reasonable price, perfect for these times of ours, sloppy and indifferent to the past. That approach allowed the Mage to sidestep his Chinese competition—”As far as I’m concerned,” he told me, “they basically don’t even exist, I buy nothing from them and I sell them next to nothing, 200,000 euros a year, at list price”—and over the years steadily build up La Torre’s volume and revenue. Now, admittedly, La Torre is a very small company—there can’t be even ten people working there, him included—but it’s successful, because over the past five years, its turnover has never failed to grow, and this year, if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, he might have reached a revenue of ten million euros.

  He tells me that the pandemic devastated three seasons, not one.

  “The winter season for this year, which was on the verge of delivering to customers, only to be called off. Summer, again for this year, which had just started showing samples, and was interrupted, and then summer for next year, because our customers have warehouses packed with items they haven’t been able to sell and that they’re certainly going to be pushing next year.”

  Problems started to appear as early as mid-February, he tells me. Foreign customers called him up to warn him that, since he was Italian, they could no longer agree to meet with him, and then came a hail of canceled orders and requests for extensions on terms of payment and for discounts.

  “With the lockdown, revenue dropped to nothing at the exact same moment that costs reached their peak, when the orders had already been produced and our subcontractors were demanding payment, because we could hardly tell them what our customers had told us…They’re all small operators, all Prato-born, and all great workers…I’ve known lots of them ever since school…”

  “So what happened?”

  “So I paid them, and I hope to be able to deliver all the bolts of cloth you saw down in the warehouse as soon as possible.”

  “And what now?”

  “Now I’m experiencing a cash crunch, just like everyone else.”

  I ask him what the status is on the aid to companies that Prime Minister Conte has announced repeatedly on TV, that vast stack of billions of euros he made such a fanfare about on the evening news, and the Mage tells me that the money promised by the government still hasn’t arrived.

  “Maybe it’ll be here by late June,” he tells me. “But my company has a cash flow problem right now.”

  La Torre is a healthy company, but how could it have been ready to survive the challenge of more than a month’s lockdown, only to open up and find itself in an industrial system that was by and large still shut down? Because even though his suppliers have reopened, a great many of his customers, and especially the retail outlets, are still locked down tight, all around the world.

  “When they locked us down it was hard, Edoardo, brutally difficult…I
sobbed like a baby, you know, I’m not ashamed to admit it…And I wept over tiny details too…I kept thinking back to when I padlocked the front gate of my company, with no idea of what the world would look like the next time I unlocked it…I even wondered whether I’d ever unlock it again…”

  He takes a long pause, picks up a pen, turns it in his fingers, compresses his lips, then lets it drop onto the desk and turns away. I look down, focusing intently on the ornamental piece of glass that enjoys pride of place on his desk—a cornucopia filled with matchboxes from world-famous restaurants and clubs and hotels: Annabel’s, Nobu, Brasserie Lipp, L’Avenue, San Lorenzo, Indochine, 7 Portes, Balthazar, Langosteria Cafe, Cipriani, Park Hyatt Tokyo, the Peninsula, the Standard.

  “But now that I’m back in the office, I’m feeling more optimistic,” he starts up again all of a sudden, and once more there’s a smile on his face. “I feel certain that soon we’ll go back there together, to all those places. You may think I’m crazy, but I have confidence. I export more than 90 percent of my production, my market is the world, and I can’t imagine that Paris, London, New York, Barcelona, Shanghai, Tokyo, Milan, and Seoul aren’t going to recover from this disaster and start to roll, like a cannonball, with all the people who are going to be even more excited about living their lives than before, and who are certainly going to want to go out and buy a jacket or a shirt or a suit…”

  And he starts to tell me about the inexhaustible energy and excitement of the world capitals, the big cities he loves, cities that never sleep—the metropolises where things happen—the evergreen playing fields where people like him, not satisfied with how they came into the world, are constantly determined to get more out of life. As he talked it was as if his dreams took shape around us, and they are ancient and glittering, Magelli’s dreams. They closely resemble the dreams my father had as a boy and young man, and indeed they are the exact same dreams. And the words, too, are the same.