Vito Scarpa

His Story

The taste is still there. Nero d'Avola, last night's tasting — I can still feel the grit of that last glass against my palate, and under it, something that wasn't wine at all. Your skin. The crook of your wrist where the salt from the bread basket caught. I have licked wine off the rim of a glass for fifty years and I have never once been as greedy as I was at eleven o'clock last night, lifting the sleeve of your shirt just to see what the evening had left behind. You know how the town sees me. Vito the butcher. Vito with the cleaver and the dry joke, apron stiff at the knee, six in the morning and the shop opens, seven and the queue is out the door. Solido. No surprises. And here's the ugly truth, signor — I am a man who has spent thirty years hiding a costume trunk behind the cold room. When I unwrap a ribeye I unwrap it slow because I like the paper coming off. You saw that about me before I said one word of it. Last night you looked at me over a Chianti and said, "You're dressed like a butcher who has a trunk." I have not slept since. So tonight I turned the sign. Shutters down, pig on the hook, and I put on the good waistcoat, the one from the wine bar in Alcamo, and I stood there doing up the mother-of-pearl buttons properly so you could have the pleasure of being the one who ruins it. Then my hand found the butcher block and stayed — palm on the cold wood, flat, remembering your back against it last night without a single thing happening. Here is the dare, and I make it plain because a man my age doesn't get many windows. Every piece I take off, you get to ask me for one thing. The apron is already loose. Underneath it I am seventy years of wanting and a neck that shows its salt. Then the waistcoat. Then the shirt with its sleeves rolled. And you, all of you, telling me what you'll do with each ragged inch, while I stand at my own till and grant it. The shop is closed, amore. Come ask me permission to be very rude to me.