PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Remembering a Faraway Home, Con Brio

Galiano Rodolfo Bruno Pascqualino Tranquilli sits, as he does every day, in the San Remo restaurant, his lunch before him. He consumes bread, butter, garlic prawns, prosciutto, fried mushrooms, fettuccine, salad oil, cheese, red wine, chocolate pastry, cigarettes and espresso: a lunch for a man of Italy. It is bad for every part of his body; it is good for his soul. Rudy Tranquilli lives, as so many do, with a small part of him lost in another land.

The San Remo is run by brothers from Potenza, the rugged south. Italians eat here: The tables are full of men who know one another, tearing into the hot, soft bread with gusto, con brio. It is a large gesture owing nothing to the squat, characterless Van Nuys street outside; it was shaped long ago in harsh mountains, on small, hard farms, in tumble-down stone cottages and village squares--a gesture captured in a thousand old paintings, fleshy, candle-lit, deeply hued.

Rudy sits at the back of the restaurant, his great, square face lugubrious and jovial in turn, always slightly anxious. He eats at the magnificent red marble table presented to the San Remo by Giambattista Pace, Rudy’s boss. This is Pace’s own table; he eats here each day with his employees from the marble company, with friends, sons, daughters, son-in-laws, nephews--the companions of his heart.

It is the price of success: to be always slightly homesick, remembering a simpler, “truer” life, forgetting the hunger after the War, the fear and danger. John Pace was 2 when his father was killed in the war. It was 1940. His mother was left to raise her children, to struggle in poverty. At 17, he became a policeman and went to serve in a bloody province. The remembered Italy and the real were not always one.

Even so, Tranquilli’s license plate reads “Pescina,” the village of his birth, the place he wants to be buried. The flat, unimpeachable sky of California will not stand over his tomb; the rich clouds of Italy, the light and dark, the chiaroscuro of his childhood, will watch over him. He lives for his wife and children, Americans all; he will lie by the grave of his mother.

Lunch starts at noon; it ends two hours later. There is no hurry; these men work early morning, late into the night, six, seven days a week. The meal--a break for the resumption of life--is part of their heritage, too. Around this marble table hangs a shadow of the past, of shutters clanging down over stores and windows, of homes dark in the midday stillness.

It is not surprising that the past melts into the present here. These men work with marble. John Pace with his flat face, closed and watchful, his angular, tensile frame, has made his fortune from the Earth’s very core, its record set down millions of years ago and now disgorged across the railroad tracks, in the vast yard and glossy showrooms decorated with polished marble floors and stairs, with granite desks and pillars and urns--300 different kinds of stone: blue pearl marble from Norway, glossy black from China, Brazilian blue, exotic veined and colored slabs cut from the land in Turkey and Greece, India and Africa.

In one corner is a slab of marble taken from the quarry in Carrara that gave Michaelangelo his stone. What an extraordinary connection is here: in an anonymous stretch of warehouses, the thread that leads to Michaelanglo’s David, to the stone that gave the gigantic and heroic spirit to the High Renaissance. Here, too, fussing matrons in mohair cardigans, decorators and architects in prissy linen, searching for door lintels, bits of bathroom. Look again, and imagine the figures of Florence and Rome seeking the life, the form hidden within these blocks, the vast, defiant spirit of man that is unchanging.

The man who owns all this, those who run it with him, remember the old ways: (“The old way was a handshake--today you have a contract 50 pages long,” says Pace’s godson, Donato Labriola.) They stood in line, washed dishes, were laid off on a day’s notice; they knew what they worked for, food, shelter, to go back proud. The new generation has got used to the marble hallways, the hillside homes, the security. With each birth, the past is distilled--the language that is no longer spoken, the soil and light, the memories of both that no longer cling. “Where you are born and raised,” says Giambattista Pace, “the ground where you take your first steps--how can you forget that?”

In time, will only the silent stone testify to the heroic spirit that crossed the seas?