Napkin Number Eleven

Saturday, 9:05 AM. The wine cellar, Hotel Bella Vista.

Matteo Esposito sat on a wooden crate of Sangiovese, in a hotel dressing gown and one sock, and wrote on a napkin.

Giulia, I love you, and before we

He stopped. He crossed out before we. He looked at what was left. Giulia, I love you. It was true, but it was not the problem. He put the napkin on the pile with the others. That made ten.

The cellar was long and low and cool, with a curved brick ceiling like the inside of a loaf. Racks of bottles ran into the dark on both sides. A single bulb hung in the middle on a wire. It was the quietest room Matteo had been in for three days.

In his dressing-gown pocket was a large iron key.

He had taken it off the hook by the kitchen stairs at twenty to eight, while Bruno was upstairs shouting about breakfast, meaning to come down here for five minutes and think. He had locked the door behind him because thinking was easier behind a locked door. Then he had heard Bruno the chef arrive, and look for the key, and say several words Matteo’s mother did not allow in the house. And the five minutes had become an hour and a half, and it was too late now to walk out holding the key. You could not come out of a cellar, on your wedding day, holding the key everyone was looking for, and say, Sorry, I was thinking.

So he stayed.

He took out the other thing in his pocket. It was the wedding menu, printed on thick cream card, with a silver border and the two families’ names at the top.

Tortellini in capon broth.
Tagliatelle with ragù in the Bolognese style.
Mixed roast: pork, veal, and capon.
Parmigiano-Reggiano, aged 36 months.

Four hundred tortellini. Giulia’s great-aunts had made them by hand on Thursday, sitting around a table in Zia Carla’s kitchen, folding each one around a finger. Matteo had watched. He had been given one to fold. He had folded it badly, and everybody had laughed, and Zia Carla had kissed him on the head and said he had the hands of a surgeon and the heart of a Neapolitan, and he had not known if it was a compliment.

Inside each one was pork loin, prosciutto, and mortadella.

Matteo had not eaten meat since he was fifteen. He had not eaten it at school, at university, in Naples, in Bologna, at a single one of the Rossi Sunday lunches he had attended in three years. He had a skill for it. He could move meat around a plate so that it looked eaten. He could cut a roast into smaller and smaller pieces until it looked like something that had been enjoyed. He could leave the table at exactly the moment the plate went round again. Giulia thought he was a slow eater. Nonno Gino thought he had a delicate stomach, like all southerners.

Only his mother knew. She had known since he was fifteen, and she had helped. She had fought his grandmother on his behalf. She had lied to three generations of aunts. She had asked the waiter last night, in front of everyone, for anything without meat, and Nonno Gino had looked at her the way a man looks at a fire.

Matteo took a new napkin.

Giulia, there is something I have never told your family, and

And what? And it is this. And I don’t eat what your grandmother’s grandmother made. And the four hundred small things your aunts made with their hands on Thursday, I cannot put in my mouth, and I will not, and I also cannot say so, because I watched them do it, and they were singing.

He crossed it out. Eleven.

Through the door at the top of the cellar stairs came voices.

He knew all of them. Bruno, the chef, low and cross. Zia Carla, high and sure of things. Cousin Fabio, who filmed everything, narrating to his phone. His own mother, sharp. And over all of them, like a trumpet over a band, Nonno Gino.

“—a hotel with four thousand bottles and no wine! It’s a joke! It’s a joke in the newspaper!”

“The owner is in Sardinia,” said Bruno.

“Then Sardinia can bring the wine!”

Matteo put his hand in his pocket and held the key. It was cold and heavy. He could walk up the stairs right now and open the door and hand it to Bruno. There would be wine. Everyone would be happy about the wine for about four seconds, and then they would look at the dressing gown, and the one sock, and the napkins, and they would ask him why.

He did not walk up the stairs.

At the far end of the cellar, past the last rack, there was a second door. It was iron, painted black a long time ago, with a padlock so rusted it had become one piece with the bolt. Someone had written a date on the wall beside it in white paint, very old, the numbers running: 1944. Cold air came under it. So did a sound, faint and steady. Water, moving somewhere under the city.

Matteo had spent some of the hour and a half looking at that door. He had thought about what it would be like to open it and walk into the dark and come out somewhere else, in a different city, as a man who had never promised anybody anything.

Then he had thought about Giulia’s face, and gone back to the crate.

He took a new napkin and did not write anything on it yet.

Upstairs, the voices went on. Assunta was saying that her son had gone for a walk. Zia Carla was saying that nobody walks without a phone, not even in Naples. Fabio was saying, to his phone, “The groom is missing, day of the wedding, you’re seeing this live.”

Then the door at the top of the stairs rattled. Someone had put a hand on it and pushed. Matteo held his breath. The door did not open. It was a good door.

“Locked,” said a voice on the other side, very close. Nonno Gino. He was standing right there, a door and fourteen steps away. Matteo could hear him breathing, and he could hear, very faintly, the beeping of the little grey machine on his wrist.

“Someone has stolen my gift,” said Gino, to the door, to the cellar, to everybody. “Someone has stolen the key. And someone has taken that boy away on the most important day of my granddaughter’s life.”

“Nonno,” said Giulia’s voice, further off. “The Carabinieri are on their way.”

“Good.” The beeping went faster. “Because when I find the man responsible for this, I swear to you, on the grave of your grandmother, I will sit him at that table, and I will make him eat everything on this menu.”

The footsteps went away.

Matteo sat on the crate of Sangiovese in the cool dark with the key in one pocket and the menu in the other.

He took a new napkin. Twelve.