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.
District: Brooklyn
Carlo a New York.
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