An Orangeman In Milan

Outside on the street Milanese businessmen in their cobalt-blue-suit-crisp-white-shirt livery stride past the café’s open front, cigarette smoke gushing down their noses.  From the backroom of the café, to where I got hustled when it became clear I only wanted a cool drink, I crane my neck to gaze at the two semi-automatic-rifle-toting soldiers pacing inside a hip-high-red-and-white-plastic-fence enclosure at the edge of the grey-stone paved piazza.

The rush hour foot traffic of hurried professionals and construction workers cradling cloud-maker-vapes, keeps up along the café’s open front. A comfortably-plump-triple-chinned-seventy-something woman drags along an insatiably nosey black and tan Dachshund. But all the view of the four-hundred-year-old piazza, my smug Irish-thick-as-a-brick-ness draws my gaze back to the café’s two waiters as they unfurl a minor international incident.

This unfortunate incident is entirely my creation for ordering something so bizarre that the long-used-to-tourists-error-filled-orders wait staff conflab at the counter in an arms-flailing, stacatto-machinegun-bursts dispute amongst themselves as to whether or not it can be served.  

“Oh…ranageh juuuze?” my waiter had asked before I was even fully seated; taking me at my word that I all I wanted was a cold drink.

His long white apron, girded tightly around his barrel chest, whips his bushy-grey eyebrows up his forehead interrogatively: His pen rapid-scratches something on the tiny pad nestled in his palm: Perhaps he’s writing the response I did not yet know I would be giving.

“No,” I answer, my thick-as-brick-ness radar revolving ever faster, “a bottle of sparklin’ water … and an orange.” 

The waiter, a man of maybe only forty-five but with the mannerisms and brusqueness of a world-weary seventy-five-year-old, stares at me, his eyes tremoring minutely in their sockets.

“Oh…rangeh juuuze!” he gushes; nodding and flourishing his pen across the paper pad with dissimulating firmness. 

“No, … no,” I say softly: I’m now the dissimulator; employing fake timidity; an age old thick-man’s technique. 

I had figured this might not go well but dehydrated from a seven-hour flight and last night’s dinner, rendered delicious by a whole month’s worth of salt, I’m craving one of the juicy oranges on the counter I passed as the old-young waiter hustled me through to the back room.

Given the look now on his face, this cross-cultural interaction could escalate such that he summons the soldiers from their plastic paddock to rifle-muzzle-convince me of the error of my culinary ways.  The Italian government has deployed soldiers at every major point of pedestrian congregation to dissuade anarchist activity.  But, as I now note, at 9:00AM, with anarchists not known as early risers, the soldiers are excitedly chatting to two fit-looking twenty-something women in matching azure running gear.

“I would an or…ange,” I say as clearly as one can say to a person who may not speak the language you’re using. Seeing that the gun-toters are otherwise engaged, brings new energy to my citrus-quest and I cup my hands Jesus-like to emphasize both the wholeness of the fruit and, it would seem, of the confusion.

“Juuuze?” the old-young waiter persists, but into his voice enters a scratchy note of something’s-wrong-here-perturbation.

“Or…ange,” I resist the urge to speak-louder-as-translation and instead go Jesus-on-a-loop – cupping my hands several times.  “Just … one orange, pour favorah.”

Immediately I feel a phony at my fake negotiation concession, delivered in terrible Italian.

The waiter gives me a withering this-is-a-Milanese-café-not-a-supermarket look that lets me know the €1 in the supermarket oranges basketed on the counter are for patrons who want €5 eggcup sized servings of “oh…ranageh juuuze,” not for consumption in their fibrous whole by dehydrated, thick-headed Irishmen.

He purses his colorless lips; departs without a word; immediately rapid-hand-gesticulation summoning over the other waiter.  The other waiter is still-young-young, his body not yet prematurely aged by years on his feet satisfying petty human wants. Standing provocatively, I may add, over the veritable cornucopia of oranges in the basket on the counter, they conflab with arm waving, noisy bitterness, casting suspicious glances in my direction.

A tall, slim man in his sixties, or it could be his thirties given the Italian male diet of cigarette-espresso-cigarette, with a thick mane of grey-white hair combed back in rolling waves, regulation cobalt-blue-suit-white-shirt, an unlit cigarillo stuck in the side of mouth, passes the conflabbers saying something fast and important in Italian as he strides behind the counter with an alpha male’s bearing.

I watch from my limited-angle back-room seat as the young-young waiter tosses an orange anxiously into the air.  Both high-aproned men stand at the counter issuing ever escalating-competing staccato bursts of rapid-fire-Italian that eventually produce a cobalt-blue-jacketed arm with its tanned, gesticulating hand – an unlit cigarillo nestled between the fore and middle fingers.

The young-young waiter barely perceptibly nods in my direction.  The sixty-or-is-it-thirty-year-old’s tanned face appears next to the waiters.  Trying to look casually in my direction, he swipes his non-cigarillo’d hand through his grey-white mane, but as I’m the only customer sitting in the back room, this ruse fails.

Now his hands shoot toward the ceiling in the universal symbol of why-the-FUCK-do-I-have-to-solve-everything, following by a short-sharp-machine-burst-of-Italian.

Instantly a knife and fork clink derisorily onto a white plate; the orange gets mock ceremoniously placed between the cutlery and the disastrously un-Milanese-café meal is delivered to my table by the not-even-pretending-to-smile old-young waiter.

“Thank…grazie, grazie,” I feign humility, hurriedly grasping the orange like I was Adam grabbing the apple from Eve’s hand.

As an in-build-part of my personal version of Irish-thickness, my success produces an instant cocktail of dopamine competing with Catholic guilt for standing my ground.

I savor the orange, the juice cool against the parched roof of my mouth.

Outside, the street is quietening down, the two young women have jogged away leaving the soldiers to gaze around sullenly for early-riser anarchists; the old-young waiter stands in the café’s open front, left hand on hip as he exhales blue cigarette smoke out into Milan’s centuries old streets.