Be That As It May

My brother Alan, having bought a flat in Alghero, Sardinia, needed of course to furnish it. I went down to keep him company and help with all that needs to be done when one has bought a new place, especially in such a bureaucracy-happy country as Italy.

One day, Alan and I ventured by bus to the nearest big city, Sássari, in search of a few sticks. Antonio, who owns a big furniture store, had already come out to the flat to measure up, so we knew what would fit.

From the intercity bus we transferred onto a local service, which took us to the vast industrial estate where this shop was. We spotted the place in the distance and got off the bus a bit further down the road. However, seeing a place in one of these industrial estates and figuring out how to reach it are quite different matters, and we spent about half an hour wandering around until we found it. When we did, it dawned on us that if we had only turned left instead of right at the first junction we had come to, we would have found the place in minutes.

But that was nothing compared to the fun of buying furniture in Italian. I am fluent in French and my brother in Spanish, both of which help. We can manage in Italian, but when it comes to specialised terms we are sometimes stumped.

‘We’ll need those things that go next to the bed,’ my brother said at one point. ‘Bedside tables?’ the woman who was helping us asked (we assumed). ‘That’s the one,’ we said. ‘Here,’ she said, although the word for that in Italian sounds rather like ‘echo’. There was a lot of that – us describing what we wanted and the saleswoman echoing it back to us using the correct terminology.

Eventually we got there, and options were agreed for my brother to consider. By then, we were in danger of missing the last coach back to Alghero. Could they call us a taxi to get to the bus? Antonio emerges. ‘No problem, I’ll drive you.’

‘To the bus station?’ we asked. ‘No no, to Alghero. No problem.’

We offered Antonio an apéritif when we got to Alghero. It was the least we could do. I left Alan and Antonio at the cash register arguing over who should pay for the drinks. ‘Did you win?’ I asked my brother when I returned. ‘No,’ he said.

I enjoyed the spiritual and mental refreshment of the visit. The pace in Sardinia is so much slower, although it was a stressful few weeks of hard work for my brother. ‘Back to the real world’, I said just before I left. Alan just looked at me. Reality is, indeed, a state of mind.