Her Night Off

Ottavia works four nights a week behind the bar of a place on via del Pratello, in Bologna. This month it’s six: she’s covering for someone with a broken wrist, so until the end of April her one night off is Thursday.

On Thursdays she goes out. She has told herself more than once what a night off is for.

Last Thursday she ordered a beer at a bar on via Mascarella and sat where she could see the whole room, which was the first mistake. By ten past nine she was counting glasses. There was one barman on, and he was young, and the fridge under the counter had a door that stuck, and she had watched him lose two seconds to it eleven times.

At the old place, before Pratello, they would run out of clean glasses by half ten every Friday, and she would spend the last hour of her shift washing instead of pouring. She knew exactly what was coming for him.

It came at twenty to ten. The queue went six deep, then nine, and a card machine somewhere decided to think about it. The barman stopped taking orders. For about forty seconds he did nothing that looked like work: he lined up eight glasses, poured four of the same beer one after another, moved the card machine to the far end of the counter and propped the fridge door open with a towel.

Then he cleared the whole queue in six minutes without hurrying once.

Nobody else in the room noticed. Ottavia was so pleased she nearly said something to the man next to her, who was talking about his holiday and would not have understood. She sat with the last third of her beer, watched the barman work a room he now owned, and at half past ten she paid, said the thing you say on the way out, and walked home along via Zamboni with her hands in her pockets.

One beer, ninety minutes. She had gone out to stop thinking about work for one night, and she’d had a lovely time doing exactly the opposite.