One Sunday every month, my drawing teacher, Franco, hosts an open drawing session at one of the pubs down in Pietrasanta. He provides a model -- clothed because, even in Italy, a nude woman standing around in a restaurant would cause unnecessary comment -- and anyone can just go in and draw. Jonathan and I went last Sunday -- me to draw and drink wine, Jonathan to work on his laptop and drink coffee. My friends Elisabetta and Lorenzo from my regular art class were there along with a handful of other people whom I didn't know.
One of them heard Jonathan and I speaking English to each other and introduced herself to us. She is Canadian, but has lived in Pietrasanta for 20 years and knows Franco and had come to draw. We chatted a bit and then the drawing began. Claudia (one of our regular models from class) was posing at one end of the room where the drawing was going on. Franco was playing his usual soothing drawing music on his phone. The regular pub patrons were going about their business at the other end of the room. Very tranquil.
All of the sudden, the Canadian turned and screamed over her shoulder the foulest stream of Italian invective that I have ever heard in my life (which is saying something.) She was cursing at a man at the other end of the room who apparently (I hadn't notice it because I was concentrating so deeply -- artistically! -- on the exact shape of Claudia's nostrils) had been cursing into his own phone. This had offended the Canadian.
Now in an American bar, there would almost certainly have been an escalation at this point, with louder shouting in return, thrown drinks, and possibly small-arms fire. Elisabetta and I instinctively scooted our chairs closer together to huddle for safety. We are not used to this sort of behavior.
But instead, I witnessed something infinitely scarier. The man walked calmly over to the Canadian woman and said in a low voice (in Italian, of course), leaning over her shoulder as she sat across from me at the table, "You shouldn't talk that way to me -- I'm the Consigliere." Then he walked away. Silence fell.
"What's a Consigliere?" Elisabetta whispered to me.
"I don't know," I said. "You're Italian, not me."
The only Consigliere I know of is Tom Hagan and he left a decapitated racehorse head in a film producer's bed. This guy, if not exactly Tom Hagan, was at least horse-adjacent. Elisabetta and I scooted even closer and concentrated very hard on our drawings. I am betting that Claudia's nostrils have never before been rendered with such exacting precision.
Jonathan and I were happy to go back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where the most heated discussions at our own beloved little pub involve the proper herbs for certain fish. (Some pull hard for sage -- others for tarragon, the Italian word for which is "dragoncello." I stay out of it.) I haven't seen either the Canadian or the Consigliere around town since then. Admittedly, having seen all of the "Godfather" movies (even the substandard third one), I haven't looked very hard for them.
