An Hour in English

The meeting of Leena Mäkinen and Aldo Heikki took place in Bar Centrale, a small bar and café on the main road through Sant'Albino, a village on the slopes below Montepulciano in southern Tuscany. Neither of them had any reason to expect the other. Leena, then twenty-one, was working a seasonal job in the kitchen of an agriturismo outside the village and had taken the afternoon off to draw. Aldo, twenty-four, was several weeks into a stay on a centuries-old farmhouse a few kilometres away, where he had come from Oulu to study traditional restoration methods.

The rain arrived shortly after two o'clock and stopped work on the farmhouse roof within minutes. Aldo walked the short distance into the village and came into the bar soaked. Every table was taken by locals sitting out the weather, and the proprietor, Renzo Bellucci, who had run the bar for most of three decades, pointed him to the one remaining chair, at a corner table where a young foreign woman sat with a coffee and a sketchbook full of the bar's regulars.

Leena spoke first, in English, and did most of the talking that followed. The conversation moved from the rain to the farmhouse to her drawings, to Barcelona, Fez, and Chiang Mai, and to the restoration work that had brought Aldo south. He answered at length only when asked about timber. For close to an hour each took the other for a traveller from somewhere else in northern Europe. The discovery that both were Finnish came only when Leena asked where he was from and he said Oulu. She laughed loudly enough to turn heads across the room. He was embarrassed, and switched into Finnish with visible relief.

Renzo kept the coffee coming and, in the course of the afternoon, reseated three sets of customers around the corner table rather than disturb it. The rain eased a little after half past three and had stopped entirely by four. The two of them were still talking when the bar began to fill for the evening.

Aldo left a little before six, having stayed the better part of four hours on an afternoon he had expected to lose to the weather. Before he went, he agreed to come back to the bar on Saturday, when Leena was next free, and she wrote the name of the agriturismo on a torn page from her sketchbook so that he could find her if the weather turned again.