In Bologna her mother handed her the tablet in a white box across the kitchen table, the lid still creased from whatever it had held before. The tomato sauce moved in folds on the stove and the window had gone soft with steam. Lucia ran her thumb along the cool flat of the cover. Her mother dried her hands on her apron and said she’d ruin her eyes hunching over that little phone; this one at least had a proper screen, big enough for the long things she wrote.
Her mother read the blog as if she were leaning out of the window, taking the measure of people on the street. “This neighbour, this is not how she is,” she would say, and Lucia would tell her she’d only written down what she saw. “Same thing,” her mother said. “You always put them in.”
That night the suitcase lay open on the floor, the clothes she wasn’t sure about in a pile she kept moving from the bed to the chair and back. She let the new screen come up white against the dark, opened a blank document, typed her name, looked at it, and deleted it letter by letter until the cursor sat alone. From the kitchen came the sound of her mother washing the last of the pans, slow, in no hurry, as if it were not the last night.
Melbourne came at her sideways, rain that smeared the tram wires into wet pencil lines above the street. She dragged her bags into a room barely wider than the bed, and before she had taken off her coat she sat on the edge of it and wrote—a long post, the kind she used to write: how the rain hit the airport glass in diagonals, how a man at the baggage carousel wept without a sound over a suitcase that turned out not to be his, how he set it back on the belt and watched it go around again. She published it with her coat still dripping onto the floor.
For the first weeks the tablet went everywhere. She wrote down street names she couldn’t pronounce, the woman at the market who pressed each peach to her cheek before she bought it, the tram driver who said good morning to the same empty seat and seemed content with the answer. She was a foreigner and so she was allowed to stare, and she took it all down, because writing it was the only way the place held still long enough to be hers.
The smell of espresso worked into her clothes and stayed there after a Greek woman named Mara took her on for the morning shifts at a café on a corner that never emptied. Mara had run the place for thirty years and spoke to the machine more gently than to her staff. “You talk to them, you don’t think,” she told Lucia the first morning, tipping her head at the line that ran to the door. “Thinking is for after.”
Lucia burned her wrist on the steam wand and made bad coffee for a week. There were three old men who came at seven, took the table by the window as if it had been built for them, and opened the morning paper with the solemnity of judges. They argued over politics, football, and the weather with equal certainty. One of them asked, every morning, whether it was too early for a drink, and another always said, “Only if you call it drinking.” Then they ordered three espressos, looked hurt by them, and asked Mara what kind of country made old men wait until lunch. She wrote them down on her breaks, in the back room among the sacks of beans—the newspapers spread like maps, the cough of the wand, the winter light coming through the front glass and turning the steam gold. Then her hands learned the machine. The portafilter knocked and locked and the milk climbed and folded without her watching it, and her breaks filled instead with Mara’s stories and the cook’s cigarette and the orders shouted back. The paragraphs became sentences. The sentences became captions under photographs of wet pavement.
The people came slowly, out of the café and the lane behind it. The cook from the kitchen next door began handing her the mistakes off the pass with a warning that she was not to get sentimental about burnt toast. A girl from her course who never came to the course turned up for the cheap coffee and said she learned better near food. Two brothers ran a bar where the late shifts let out and never charged her for the first drink; hospitality was cheaper than accounting, they said. For a while she still wrote them down, especially the cook, who had a burn on his thumb and danced badly behind the bins when the rush was over. One night she came home with the whole thing ready in her head. She opened the tablet and saw only the blank page waiting for her. Nothing came up. She closed it again. Then there was another night she meant to write down and didn’t, and after that she stopped noticing which nights those were.
By summer they closed places together. One warm night they ended up on a rooftop in Brunswick, six or seven of them, a bottle going around and the city below in a grid of other people’s windows. One of the brothers told a long story about his father and a stolen boat that may not have been true and was better for it. Someone put a coat over her shoulders. Someone asked what she did, back home, and she said she used to write things down, and heard herself say used to. Then the song changed and the question went with it. The tablet was in her bag at the bottom of the stairs, in the dark, where it had been for a long time.
The blog had not moved in months. What she put up came in flashes—a photo of the bar, a hand around a glass that was not hers. On their Sunday calls her mother held the phone too close and squinted into it. “I scroll and scroll,” she said. “All these smiling faces. I don’t find your stories anymore. Where did the girl go who wrote things down.” Lucia said she was right there, she’d put something up soon, and while she said it she pushed the tablet further down into her bag, under the books she had also stopped reading.
Then the summer turned and the rain came back, and something turned with it. One night after a shift that had run long and loud she came home and plugged the tablet into the wall; it had died weeks ago and she had not noticed. She waited for it to wake, opened a new document, and watched the cursor blink in the white. A weight settled under her ribs, low, with no name she could give it. She sat there until the screen dimmed on its own. In the black glass her own face came up, and her hair past her shoulders, longer than she had ever kept it at home. Her mother used to gather a handful of it and say, i tuoi capelli sono la tua forza—your hair is your power—half a joke, half something else. She held the dark screen a while longer, then set it down.
She bought a notebook, green, with an elastic band around it, like one she had carried at sixteen, and took it to a café where no one knew her and sat by the window to make the words come. She uncapped the pen. People passed on the wet street. After an hour the page held the date and nothing else. She capped the pen, put the notebook in her bag beside the dead tablet, and did not take it out again.
The following Tuesday there was an envelope in the mailboxes downstairs—cream, Italian stamps, her name on the front in careful capitals. She carried it up and sat on the bed with her jacket still on and tore it open. One sheet of lined paper, the blue ink pressed hard enough to read from the back. Her mother, who had left school at fourteen and never spoken a word of English, had written it in English. There was a word crossed out and written again until the paper went soft, and one place where she had given up and left the Italian, a small arrow beside it as if Lucia could follow it back.
I know how much you love to write. So I took a pen and a paper, and I started.