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BAGATELLE
by Mike DeCapiteMy father and I were in Perugia. It was winter. We found our way to the back of an old grocery. 1930s-style grocery. There was a dark wood-and-glass case of old candies. Hardened licorices and candy buttons and fruits, fanciful old candies from another time. We looked at frozen meats. Stacked in a corner were packages of fresh salmon steaks on squares of styrofoam, wrapped in cellophane. The salmon steaks were visible only by their scaly metallic skins. Each package was marked with a tag indicating the day the fish was caught.
At the back of the store was a huge lottery game. A painted green-&-black map of the world took up the whole back wall. Below it was a row of knobs, like the pulls on a cigarette machine. Immigrants from all over the world were clustered around in dark coats and caps. I didn't understand the set-up until my father explained it to me and the crowd. The way the lottery machine worked was that a customer dropped four coins into a slot and then tore his tickets from a thick apron of colorful lottery tickets attached to the wall. He selected a city or town, anywhere in the world, by turning a dial. The name of his chosen city would appear in a little window on the right location on the map. Once my father explained it the crowd moved forward and the action began. The first man turned the dial and chose a city called Buckholtz. The word Buckholtz appeared in white letters in a window on the wall in Germany. The man peered into a nickelodeon-type viewer and pulled out one of the knobs, which opened the lens of a movie camera situated somewhere in his chosen town for five seconds. The small viewer screen showed a snowy street. A woman bundled in black hurried past, leaning into the wind and flying snow. The hope was that a long-lost friend or relative would be walking past the camera during that five-second glimpse.
One person after another squeezed up to the wall to try his chances. There was an eruption of excitement as a man caught a glimpse of someone he knew in Rome. Whether the glimpse was present or past I couldn’t say.