Sitting just a few meters apart, I notice that the grandmother talks about someone who learned English through « the Poets ». Suddenly, and getting distracted from my own business, I realise how elegant her speech is. She reminds me of the female characters in 19th-century society novels, like coming directly out of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton’s (with British accent, though) stories.

And there we were, sharing a terrace in a 13th-century building on the outskirts of Florence, with a privileged view of the city surrounded by a vast blue sky (how could this landscape not add to my imagination?). I wondered how it could be that our paths crossed on that cold, sunny morning. I certainly wouldn’t be a character in those novels, for I lack every appealing characteristic in them. And if I happened to be, we certainly wouldn’t have met.

Tuesday 10:30 in the morning, I hear that and imagine the family going to the train station and traveling around England in luxury carriages… The grandmother talks to the oldest grandson in an adult, formal yet caring manner, holding the wisdom of someone who has seen much of the world and still gets amazed at the innocence of children. Are you leaving in May or June?, she asks her daughter. I leave at the end of May to America. (America has always sounded to me like an egocentric term coming from overly patriotic people in the US. Now, it was as if, for this family, ‹ America › was still their colony – perhaps a land breeding rebels and a revolution, but their lives still untouched by it.)

Anyway, it’s precisely the mother of the young boys that makes me grasp how we can find ourselves next to each other here and now, for if she’s a core piece in the tale, she’s also something else: a modern mom.
– hey, please, don’t disturb other people’s breakfast; she calmly tells the baby boy as he noisily tries to reach a vase close to me.
– they don’t mind; I look and respond with a smile.

To be sure, it’s not with having kids that I can relate to; it’s for knowing that we are a product of the (more or less) same time. But indeed, not of the same place… I now hear her saying to her mom, he’s one of the best pianists of… and I’m sort of back to the fiction.