The Bakery

another snippet of my current fiction

It’s time to share with you another blip from the novel I’m currently writing. Yet again — will this make it into the final story? I don’t know. This may ultimately be a writing exercise to help me better know these characters, this setting, and their dilemmas therein, but it’s still been fun to write. Enjoy!

p.s. Here’s the first installment I shared, in case you missed it.

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photo source

Marco was up hours before the rest of his peers, kneading dough and nose itching from the flour covering it. The village was still dark, and outside the bakery windows nothing moved but the leaves of the trees rustling in the distance. It was a time-honored hobby of his to complain in the evening at the local bar about his early wake-up call the next morning, so he’d never admit it to anyone except maybe his grandmother, who would understand, that it was his favorite time of day. He loved the short walk from the family’s house to the bakery, maneuvering through the cobblestones he knew by heart, loved the quiet he brought to life when he flicked on the overhead lights, loved having sole control of the radio as he added scoops of yeast to nearly-hot water and preheated the ovens for the morning’s ration of Florentine frittatas.

Mrs. Annese hobbled by outside the front window, rosary in hand and headed to the church for lauds. She waved to Marco with no turn of her head, knowing he was there, her other hand working the beads and mouth muttering the gratia plena. He nodded back with his head, hands full of dough. They shared the village this early in the morning.

Frassinetti was a village with one bus stop, a church in the center with a broken bell, and roughly five surnames shared amongst the residents. Like most other hamlets in the region, it was constructed so long ago that modern cars wouldn’t fit its narrow cobblestoned paths, which meant in 1965 Giuseppi Zucca finally relented some of his farmland to the town council so they could build a village parking lot on the outskirts. In it was parked mostly motorbikes or family sedans, but three times a week in the summer a tour bus from Florence opened its doors to spill out foreigners eager to kiss the feet of the statue of St. Cajetan in the piazza then sample a plate of pici all’aglione before hopping over to the next town.

A group of elderly men made the most afternoon noise of this drowsy town, neighbors who grew up side by side and served alongside each other in the War, who raised children and farmed land and earned the right to hours of bocce ball. Their wives kept the begonias watered and their bellies filled, and every now and then their grandchildren would visit from Rome for the weekend. Frassinetti’s population was like many small villages in Italy: aging, but with an ever-increasing demographic of young parents who’d grown weary of city nightlife and prices yet still needed to live nearby for their commute.

And then there’s Marco and a smattering of fellow young men, there because they’re still there. They spent their early years kicking a football up and down the roads to the piazza, eating tomatoes off balconies like apples, running to the lake and jack-knifing into the water, clothes strewn on the shore. As teens they whistled when girls like Maria and Gianna walked by with their shopping bags, more as a call to each other’s assurance of manhood than a certainty of what to do would if one of the young women were to stop, toss their ponytail behind their shoulder, and wink, lips stained red and hips curved. Their adolescent jobs morphed into inheritances, apprenticeships in holding onto the shop keys passed on from their grandfathers and their grandfathers. The faded sign outside Marco’s bakery was bolted to the stone façade the same year Rome replaced Florence as Italy’s capital, now well over a hundred years ago. There was never any question whether he’d work under another sign. A few of his childhood friends managed to escape to university in Milan or even abroad in Germany, but not Marco. He stayed in Frassinetti. But he traveled frequently. Sometimes daily, depending on the busy season.

He slid the frittatas into the oven, toweled off his hands, and walked to the back of the shop for a fresh bag of flour. Only one left. He’d get more later this morning. Marco heaved it on his shoulder, grabbed a new jar of yeast, and spooned granules into the giant mixing bowl. He poured warm water from the kettle, stirred, then knifed open the bag of flour while the yeast bloomed. Soon the dough would prove its first rise, offering him plenty of time to get more eggs for the afternoon’s pasta bundles and back to the bakery before flipping the open sign. He’d get the flour then, he decided.

While he waited for the yeast to finish, Marco fished out a cassette tape from the drawer underneath the cash register, popped it into the radio, hit play, then began spooning out hills of flour with his scoop, eyeballing the amount from memory.

“In the end, I'm convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue,” said Mario Cuomo’s voice on the tape. ‘if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers…”

“If suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue,” mimicked Marco. “InnuENDo. Innuendo… …DIalogue,” he repeated, his cadence thick with the Latin lick of Italian.

“If we're not afraid of the truth even when the truth is complex…” said the man on the tape, and Marco joined him with, “this debate, by clarification, can bring relief to untold numbers of confused—even anguished—Catholics,” even though he couldn’t stop saying CattOlico, the English -th impossibly elusive.