Locavore on the loose

We have been gasping under a suffocating heatwave for at least two weeks (months, years…losing track of everything), with temperatures in the 90s (F) and humidity beyond calculating.

My vital functions are down to the minimum, and evidently my brain isn’t on the “Save First” list, so my posts will also be at the minimum for a short while.

But there was a lady the other morning at the fruit and vegetable boat who gave me an unexpected little jolt.

I had just begun to tell Massimo and his cigarette what I wanted when the lady came bustling up behind me.  She already had her vegetation in a thin plastic bag, but she announced that it was threatening to give out at any moment.

Without so much as a by-your-leave (I guess when my brain disappears, the rest of me goes with it?) she extended the bag toward Massimo to demonstrate its fragility and asked him to give her another one.  She spoke in Italian but I couldn’t place the accent — it seemed to come from somewhere in the central regions.  But I could tell by her behavior that she wasn’t from around here.

“A stronger one,” she added in a way that blended a whiff of anxiety with a strong gust of busybody.  “You can see that this one isn’t going to hold out.  It really is too thin.  Just think if I were to try to take it onto the vaporetto and it broke, I don’t know what I’d do.”  She did seem a little keyed up.  “So another bag, please.  I’ll pay.”

“You know, you could also carry your own canvas shopping bag,” Massimo remarked in a noncommittal way.  (He said “canvas,” although  everybody uses ripstop nylon these days.  Anyway, she knew what he meant.)  It was very nice, the way he accommodated her without creating any further anxiety while at the same time letting her know that her fate, where her fruit was concerned, didn’t have to depend on him, or the firemen, or the police divers, or anybody but herself.

“Oh no, I don’t like those bags,” she quickly replied, implying that he’d suggested something her mother had warned her never to be seen with. My own mother was certainly implacable where it came to some things, such as my walking barefoot in the summer on the sidewalk just in front our house, because people would think I belonged to the Jukes and the Kallikaks.

Massimo handed her the never-fail sturdier green plastic bag.  “Ten cents.”  Asking for the money confirmed that she isn’t from around here; I think he was making a point.

She paid.  She left.

“Wow,” I said as he turned his attention back to me.  “No canvas bags.”  He gave a little shrug and an even littler smile.

“Yesterday she asked for lemons from Sant’ Erasmo,” he said.  “And bananas from Sant’ Erasmo.”  (To any reader who might not remember that these delicacies do not, are not, and could not be grown on Sant’ Erasmo — well, maybe the lemons could, I’m not sure — it would be like asking for mangosteens or manioc from Sant’ Erasmo).

“They’re really good,” I said, smiling with fake sincerity.  “A lot of people don’t know that. Did you give them to her?”

“Of course.”

What is more treacherous than a very thin and overloaded plastic bag?  A tiny bit of information that you don’t understand.  Just because she had  seen “Sant’ Erasmo” listed on various signs stuck into piles of local produce — eggplants, string beans, leeks — she interpreted this as “best” because it’s right next door, the closest loca that a vore could want.

I was sorry that she’d let herself improvise, because she was clearly so sure of herself in every way.  Food for thought.  From Sant’ Erasmo.