Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir by Alba Donati

Author:Alba Donati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

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Today’s orders: Qualcosa by Chiara Gamberale, Les Villes de papier by Dominique Fortier, Rosa candida by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

March 22, 2021

It’s 6:00 a.m. The weekend netted us a grand total of eight visitors, plus splendid sunshine and arctic temperatures. Luckily, online orders are keeping us afloat.

Donatella couldn’t come, as she was busy organizing a sale of children’s shoes. Years ago she’d opened a little boutique with her daughter, far too fancy for where we live. The shop’s long gone, but they still have some stock in their basement, and they sell it off little by little to mobs of mothers and aunts rooting through the piles of shoes, looking for the right size and color. But Donatella’s as tough as they come, pretty unflappable.

Yesterday we exchanged a few messages—I sent her a picture of a haircut that I think would look great on her. Donatella married “a foreigner,” which is to say a guy she met in a club thirty-five years ago. Graziano is one of those old-fashioned, earnest men—unabashedly possessive when it comes to Donatella, but clever enough to accept the resulting mockery with good grace. The truth is, as Ernesto is very fond of saying, that Graziano is still on his honeymoon. And he’s right—you won’t find a couple more madly in love than those two.

Donatella is two years younger than me, an age gap that felt unbridgeable when we were little. Childhood is the proof that time is entirely subjective. When I was thirteen, Donatella’s uncle came to visit from Australia with his son, Silvano, who was eighteen. That was a phenomenal summer. We spent hours dancing to rock ’n’ roll in my basement. I contributed our cassette player, he his Elvis Presley tapes. You should have seen his moves—John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction had nothing on us, gyrating in a basement along with all the “little ones”: Donatella, Luana, and Tiziana. Silvano was smitten; I was flattered. I wore miniskirts and I’d started to develop something resembling curves.

Anyway, the summer of ’73 was a memorable one. It was bookended by the inauguration of the World Trade Center on April 4—which left me largely indifferent—and another event that instead resonated deep inside my young bones: Pinochet’s coup in Chile and Allende’s suicide on September 11. As for us, we kept dancing, without a care in the world, in our basement ballroom. The following year Silvano came back, convinced he had a girlfriend in Lucignana, but I had moved to Florence. For this Donatella never forgave me.

Today is Monday, which means Alessandra will be here shortly. I smile, anticipating our usual conversation:

“I’d like my breakfast, please.”

“Would you, now? How about some coffee and a nice ‘fuck you’ to start the day?”

I adore her. Later we’ll go to check if Mike’s house has been damaged by last night’s storm. I only wish our stockings from Israel were here—that’d be perfect.

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