Harry Best - Cakes and Ale
“How do you know Trieste so well, Melancholy?”
He didn’t respond at first. No, he was huffing and puffing away, focused on climbing the main hill that overlooks the city. Smokers, you know, don’t have particularly expansive lung capacity, and Melancholy was concentrating on the walk and didn’t hear me. I asked him again.
“I don’t, Harry. No one does.”
We were walking close to the church dedicated to San Giusto when I had the epiphany. I felt like a fool for not realizing the truth sooner.
“One of the city’s best journalists,” Melancholy continued, “Mazzi, once wrote that to know Trieste is impossible. We can only love her. Capire Trieste, da lontano e da vicino, è difficile. Forse la si può solo amare, e basta. Can’t you see, Harry? We don’t need to understand something to love it.”
We don’t need to understand something to love it. Oh, sweet and patient guests. He didn’t need to say anything more. I knew why Melancholy had a photographic image of Trieste imprinted on his mind.
James Joyce had lived in Trieste. It was so obvious. Melancholy loved Joyce and is there a writer more impossible to understand? And, now, I knew exactly where we were going to lunch, I knew exactly what that cafe Pirona or something was—some horrid working man’s cafe that the crazy Irishman probably liked to frequent. Melancholy, you will not be surprised to learn, preferred to eat in very nice restaurants, unless… how do I put this. Unless they fit a particular aesthetic sensibility, if that’s not too precious a way of saying it.
I remember the name of the cafe now: Pasticceria Pirona. And the rest of the story is coming back very strong now—I can almost see the desserts in my mind’s eye. Mind’s eye. I’ve always found that a gross expression. Mind’s eye. Not very stimulating to the appetite.
But back to the story, yes, back before the tides of memory wash me away completely. I must say it’s funny how memories work. I think they’re called madeleines, those cakes that provoke the great remembrance of things past. (No, I haven’t read it. Before I could ever start, its length always defeated me, that row of volumes was too intimidating to bear. I declined to stand on the field of honor in that particular duel.) I can see one of them now. The cafe had an excellent version of them.
Pasticceria Pirona, it turned out, dear guests, was not a working man’s bar. I had thought we would be eating at a dimly lit cafe, filled with Union Jacks and Old Men Just Back From The Sea, who played checkers in a corner and ogled the not-so-young serving women. Or perhaps I don’t know James Joyce as well as my family connection to Stephen Dedalus should warrant. But Pirona turned out to be an elegant little coffee shop that served sweets and cakes and madeleines to customers best described as very nice. Very nice, of course, is supposed to connote a certain, well, shall we say, particular background?
Incidentally, very nice was an expression Melancholy liked to use at university. He taught me the full range of meaning those two words could have with different inflections. But his favorite was the more cryptic, “OK, OP.” Whenever someone walked by Melancholy did not approve of, he would whisper to me, “not OK, OP.” Had a nice ring to it. And now you are going to ask me what that expression means, and I must demure. Perhaps another time. I don’t mean to hold anything back from you, but we will never get to the end of this story unless I show a little restraint.
There was no place to sit. That’s the first thing I noticed. And the food was not appropriate for lunch. Breakfast that morning had been a pastry and coffee in Venice before our train ride, and so we were starving.
