Ch. 02
Il Cortado
The tram woke her at six-forty, same as every morning. Not the alarm — the tram. The number 3 on Via Torino, which passed close enough to rattle the windows in a building that had been rattling since before she was born. Lucia had stopped noticing the sound the way you stop noticing your own breathing, but some mornings, cold ones, the ones where she'd slept badly, it came through sharp and present.
She made coffee on the stovetop, her mother's Bialetti, six-cup, the handle slightly melted on one side from that time Carlotta had left it on the burner empty. Four years she'd been meaning to replace it.
The apartment was small. Two rooms plus a kitchen that was really a hallway with ambitions. Books on every surface. Printouts stacked on the table and on top of other printouts. A map of Milan on the wall that she'd marked with colored pins for a research project three years ago and never taken down. Carlotta said the apartment looked like a detective's office in a movie. Lucia said detectives had bigger kitchens.
She drank the coffee standing at the window. Outside, Via Torino was already moving: people in jackets walking fast, a guy opening the newsstand on the corner, the smell of bread from the forno two doors down mixing with exhaust and wet stone. April in Milan was not April in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, April smelled like rain on hot pavement and the river. Here it smelled like diesel and sfogliatella and something mineral that came off the old buildings when it was damp.
She showered, dressed. Leather jacket, dark jeans, the boots she'd bought in a market in Porta Ticinese that a colleague had called "very Argentine," which Lucia took as a compliment and the colleague probably hadn't meant as one. Hair pulled back. No earrings today. She'd lost one of the silver hoops somewhere between here and Quilmes and hadn't replaced the pair.
The walk to the university took twelve minutes if she didn't stop for anything. She stopped for a cortado at the café on Via Festa del Perdono, the one with the old wood bar and the woman who had been getting her order wrong for three years.
"Un cortado, per favore."
The woman nodded. She brought a latte.
Lucia looked at it. The woman was already serving someone else.
She drank the latte. It was fine. It was always fine. That wasn't the point.
Lucia's office was shared with two other researchers, neither of whom was ever there before eleven. She had the room to herself until then. Best part of the arrangement. The desk was covered: folders, photocopies, a cup of pens that didn't work and one that did, a stack of scientific journals she'd requested through the library six weeks ago and received last Thursday.
She'd sorted them into stacks over the past three days. Green sticky notes for the ones that checked out. Yellow for review again. Pink for the ones she'd labeled fishy in handwriting small enough that a colleague glancing at her desk wouldn't read it. And one paper, set apart from the rest with a red sticky note that just said no. Four stacks, thirty-something papers. Something was off. She couldn't say what yet.
She put the journals aside and turned to the thing that actually needed her attention today.
The Eco homage. Ten years since his death, which in this department meant ten years since the walls went up. Umberto Eco had taught at Bologna, not Milan. Everybody knew that, and nobody cared. He'd lived in the city for decades, died in the city, and built the semiotic tradition that every humanities department in Italy ran on whether they admitted it or not. Milan claimed him anyway. The department had planned an evening event — a screening of a documentary, a panel, a reading from The Name of the Rose. Lucia had organized most of it because nobody else volunteered and because she was the only person in the department who could get the auditorium for free, which in an Italian public university was the only real skill that mattered.
The auditorium had a projector. The projector needed a lamp. The lamp had died two weeks ago.
Lucia had submitted the replacement request that same day. In university time, that meant it would arrive somewhere between soon and never. This morning, she'd found a note in her mailbox from the janitor: Signora Ferrante, the lamps arrived. I left them in the storage room. Key is at reception.
She walked down to the storage room, a closet behind the lecture halls that smelled like dust and cleaning products, and found the box on the shelf. It was smaller than she expected. She picked it up. Light. Too light.
She opened the box. Six lamps, individually wrapped. She pulled one out. It was lighter than the old lamp, noticeably lighter, as if the glass was thinner or the filament was different or the whole thing was made of something else entirely. She carried it up to the auditorium, climbed the ladder, removed the dead lamp, and tried to install the new one.
It didn't light up.
The base fit fine, the connector was the same type, but when she powered on the projector, nothing happened. She checked the connection, tried again, tried a second lamp from the box, a third. None of them worked. Same model number, same connector, same box. But the lamps were wrong. Different material, different weight, different everything except the label.
She climbed down and picked up the box again. The label had the model number, it matched, she'd written it down herself, and a supplier code she didn't recognize. The fabrication date was recent. These weren't old stock sitting in a warehouse. Someone had manufactured them this year, to this spec, and they were wrong.
She put the box down. She went to her office and sent an email to the department: The Eco homage is postponed. Projector issue. Will reschedule when resolved. Apologies.
She typed it in Italian, which was the language she used for things she didn't want to feel anything about.
"Un cortado."
Latte.
She took it to the table by the window and sat with the papers she'd brought from the office. Outside, students crossed the piazza in groups: jackets, backpacks, the particular Italian gesture-while-talking that still, after twenty years, struck her as performance. In Buenos Aires, people gestured because they couldn't help it. Here it was choreography.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Carlotta: EATNG AT NONNAS 2NITE OR R U COOKING?? xx
Lucia thumbed back: going 2 c nonno. eat w/e u want. pasta in fridge
the fusilli frm sun??? :S
its fine
ITS THURSDAY MA
it's fine, Carlotta.
She put the phone down. Twenty-six years old and still checking the age of the fusilli. Carlotta had her own life: a job at a bookshop in Navigli, a boyfriend Lucia had met twice, opinions about everything and patience for nothing. She was twenty-six and still texting her mother about leftovers.
She looked at the papers. She looked at the latte she hadn't ordered. She thought about the lamp and how it weighed nothing in her hand, like a prop.
She opened her bag and pulled out a notebook, a real one, paper, spiral-bound, the kind she'd used since university because she didn't trust screens for thinking. She wrote: Lamps — wrong model? Wrong supplier? Six units from the budget and none of them work. Talk to purchasing.
She closed the notebook. She finished the latte. She didn't go back to the office.
He opened before she knocked. He always heard her on the stairs.
"Lucia." He said her name the Italian way, stress on the second syllable, LuCHIa. Wrong, but she'd stopped correcting him twenty years ago.
"Papá."
The apartment was the apartment. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room that served as office, library, and museum. On the wall behind the couch: a framed photograph of the FIAT plant in Ferreyra, Córdoba. A group of engineers standing in front of an assembly line, Gianni second from the left, younger and thinner, smiling in a way Lucia had never seen him smile in person. Next to it, a photo of Avenida Rivadavia in Quilmes, taken from the corner where the empanada place used to be. On the bookshelf, between technical manuals and old editions of Corriere della Sera: a model Fiat 600 in pale blue, the kind that every Argentine family had in the seventies, that Gianni had bought at a flea market in San Telmo in ninety-nine and kept on the shelf ever since. The apartment was half Milan, half Buenos Aires, and the halves didn't fit together any better than the man who lived in them.
He was cooking. He was always cooking when she came. It was how he made the visit feel planned, even when she showed up unannounced. Tonight it was pasta e fagioli, the Milanese version, which he made with the seriousness of a man feeding his daughter.
"Your mother called this morning," he said, stirring. "The sister is worse. She's not eating."
"Did Mamá say anything about coming here?"
"She said maybe in June. After the doctors."
June. It was always June, or September, or after something. Gianni had said the same thing for years in the other direction — I'll come back to Buenos Aires, after this project, after this thing at work that I can't explain because you wouldn't understand and I'm not sure I do either. He used to fly every month. Then every two months. Then his back went, and then his blood pressure, and then the flights became phone calls, and the phone calls became shorter, and now he was seventy-six in an apartment in Città Studi stirring soup while his wife took care of her sister on the other side of the Atlantic.
They ate at the small table by the kitchen window. The conversation was the conversation: his back, the weather, a neighbor's dog that barked at five in the morning, the price of bread. Gianni talked about these things with commitment, with opinions.
Lucia ate and listened. She looked at the FIAT photo on the wall. She thought about asking him. About the plant, about what FIAT knew, about New Year's Eve 1999 and why he'd stood on the balcony in Buenos Aires watching the fireworks over the Río de la Plata with tears running down his face while everyone else celebrated. She'd been twenty-one. She remembered the tears but not the conversation, because there hadn't been one. He'd wiped his face, come back inside, said "happy new year" in a voice that wasn't happy, and never mentioned it again.
She wasn't going to ask. Not tonight. But the lamps were still bothering her, and she needed to say something that wasn't about the weather or the dog.
"I had a stupid day," she said. "The department ordered replacement lamps for the auditorium projector. Six of them. Same model number, same box. None of them worked."
Gianni looked up from his plate. "What do you mean, didn't work?"
"They fit the socket but they didn't light up. Like the inside was different. They were lighter, too. Much lighter than the old ones."
Something changed in his face. Not much — a sharpening around the eyes. The engineer coming back online.
"It's not the filament," he said. "If the weight is different, they changed the light source. Different technology inside the same housing. The connector fits but the power draw is wrong — your projector is sending voltage for one thing and getting —"
The pot on the stove hissed. Water bubbling over the rim, hitting the burner, the sharp smell of wet metal on heat. Gianni stopped mid-sentence. He got up — slowly, the back — and turned down the flame. He stood there for a moment with his hand on the knob, his back to her. When he turned around, the engineer was gone.
"Probably a factory defect," he said. "It happens. The supply chains are long and nobody checks anything anymore."
He sat down. He picked up his bread.
Lucia looked at her plate. Then at him.
"I worked with industrial lighting for twenty years. You pick things up." He shrugged. "More bread?"
"Sure."
He got up slowly and brought the basket from the counter. The bread was good. He'd bought it at the forno on Via Marconi, where he went every morning because the walk was exactly the distance his doctor had told him to walk and not a meter more.
"Papá," she said.
"Hmm?"
She looked at him. Seventy-six, thin, careful with every movement. A man who had just explained in ten seconds what a university purchasing department couldn't figure out in two weeks, and then pretended he hadn't.
"Nothing," she said. "The soup is good."
He smiled. "Your mother's recipe. I still can't get the beans right."
She sat at her desk. The papers were where she'd left them that morning, next to the printouts and the map with the colored pins and the notebook from the café.
She opened her email. Three messages. A department circular about next month's faculty meeting. A newsletter from an academic mailing list she'd subscribed to twenty years ago and never left. And nothing from Diego.
She scrolled down. Her last message to him was from three weeks ago. He hadn't replied.
He never replied quickly. She knew this. Diego's emails came back days later, sometimes weeks, usually short. One line, two lines, a joke that landed sideways. Carefully, sparingly, never giving more than the moment seemed to require. She'd learned not to take it personally, which wasn't the same as not minding.
She opened a new message. She typed his address from memory.
Subject: tuesday, probably
The university cancelled an event I spent three weeks organizing because a box of replacement lamps didn't work. Not one. Six lamps, same model, and not a single one fit the projector. I'm starting to think the universe has a problem with Umberto Eco.
She looked at what she'd written. She selected it all and deleted it.
She changed the subject line: back in milan. everything is the same here too.
Arrived Tuesday. The rain here is colder. My father looks older every time, which I know is how time works but it's still annoying. The university hasn't changed. The woman at the café downstairs still gets my order wrong. I ordered a cortado and she brought me a latte. Again. I think she does it on purpose, as a statement about Argentines who come back and expect things to be how they left them.
How's Jersey City? Still standing?
She sent it.
The screen sat there with the sent-message confirmation. The apartment was quiet. The tram had stopped running for the night. Past eleven, then. She could hear the building settling, the pipes, a television somewhere below playing something with a laugh track.
She turned off the PC. She sat there for a moment, then opened the notebook and wrote one line: weight. She underlined it. Went to bed.