Carlo
in New York
— USA

   A friend of mine, Sardinian like me, has lived in New York for ten years. Her husband Avram is a jazz musician, son of Russian immigrants from Brooklyn. They take me to dinner at Fanelli’s, a place I’ve never been though it seems like I’ve known it all my life. Everyone exchanges greetings and hugs – customers, the barmen, the waiters. A football game can be seen on the TV screen. I ask my friend if he’s a fan. “I grew up in Brooklyn. I liked soccer, and I liked jazz”, he replies. “My wife thinks soccer is for average people. Maybe in Italy, but if you grow up in America, loving soccer makes you an eccentric. Me watching soccer and listening to jazz as a kid was deemed very weird behaviour”. The world gets more and more similar, we are all suffering from an overdose of images, videos, sounds; travel is no longer the adventure it was in the past, though it is still a strange experience. Even in New York, a place we all think we know to some extent before arriving, it still makes you see things you thought you knew all about in a different way. Like soccer.

   I already know the owner of the house who I’m introduced to by my musician friend when we stop by after dinner. Though I have never met him before he opens the door, he comes from my same seaside city. I know his rather drawled accent, his face like a youngster that doesn’t age, his clever smile. We could talk about our soccer team for hours, but not this evening. Here we are two compatriots on the other side of the world, wrapped up in New York, in this glass house on the fifteenth floor. “You can see the Statue of Liberty, even at night, if you look in the right direction”. I try, but I can’t see it. I see Manhattan, its skyscrapers, the Williamsburg Bridge, the East River. “To talk about the house, we have to wait for my wife, Fleur”, Carlo says. “She’s the one who makes the decisions, and I let her do it”. Carlo worked in London for many years, and then a Sardinian friend asked him to come here to manage one of his restaurants. “He told me: ‘Come have a look; I don’t want to exaggerate, but this city can be very Mediterranean’. And it is somewhat true, if you arrive from London - the clear sky, the light, the water all around you. I grew up in a house in Cagliari with a view of the sea, but until I left I never realized how precious that is”. Carlo’s wife is French and works at the UN; she has travelled the world. “She wanted these world maps at all costs. Do you see them? She had no rest until she found exactly the ones she wanted for this wall. But I was the one to choose the house. She’s the type who’d have an antique house, old red bricks, old fireplaces, old windows. When we were expecting our daughter, I thought: at all costs, no three-story house with narrow staircase and no elevator. We saw tons of places, most of them horrible, and then one day I came across this new building. I went nuts - a house with views on three sides, full of light. I thought: we will be the first to live here, the first chapter in the history of this apartment”.

   As Carlo talks, Lulù, the six months old with many incomprehensible things to say, keeps up a steady flow of chatter. Even when her mother arrives, she continues to hold forth. Would you like your daughter to grow up here? I ask my hosts. “I’ve been here for ten years”, Fleur says. “Our jobs could take us elsewhere, but we will always have ties to NY, and to our friends here. I have lived in Senegal, Madagascar, Mexico, Denmark, and in the future – who knows?” Lulù, in her father’s arms, listens carefully, in a rare spell of silence. “In the meantime, I show her the dawn and sunset from the balcony”, says Carlo. “It sounds like a cliché, but every day the light seems to be slightly different”. It’s not our Mediterranean, but it has its charms.