Sartorial

Pertaining to tailors (adj.)


The poet Virgil died in a little town called Piedigrotta in Northern Italy. In the center of Piedigrotta there is a place called the Round Square. There are two tailor shops in the Round Square, Tamado's and Rozzini's, one on either side of the plaza. The two best tailors in all of Italy occupy these shops. They do not take business from one another, in a marvel of market competition they actually exist in a kind of harmony with each other. Since they are the best tailors in a country known for its garments, many wealthy sybarites come from all over the world to the Round Square for their tailoring. If Rozzini can't take a customer, he calls Tamado and makes an appointment-- and vice versa.
One day a particularly imaginative and literary investment banker named Sebastian Harris had an idea while watching Rozzini spin around him and make little chalk marks on his cuffs and inseam and sleeves.
"Rozzini?"
"Yah yah?"
"I have an idea."
"What is your idea, senore?"
"The festival for Virgil is coming up right?"
"Yes yes, the day the great poet died in our town. Always a nice time of year here."
"Well, I was thinking just now that it would be interesting to see you and Tamado make suits for each other at the same time."
"I do not understand, senore, what you mean."
"Well, you and Tamado are masters. Watching you work is real poetry, and I think it would be great fun, an epic kind of event, if both of you tailored suits for one another simultaneously."
"Where and why and for what would we do this?" the old man asked, a perpetual smile on his face.
"Out there," Harris pointed to the Round Square, "during Virgil's festival."
Rozzini looked down, a measuring tape thrown about his shoulders.
"This seems difficult logistically," he said, "Tamado and I are busy busy men, and also, to cut a suit requires great stillness from the person one is fitting it to. Two tailors at the same time would most likely cancel themselves out if such a thing were attempted."
"Well," replied Harris, "I'd make sure all the appointments were taken care of. And we could hold a benefit for the church and the schools, advertise around. It would be great for the town. Events bring people. People bring money..."
Harris' eyes lit up with creation as the possibility of this distended in his mind, each second another possible facet of the event birthing into his imagination. His business-busy mind milled over the marketing strategies, the possible investors, tourist agencies, and pamphlets. After a few seconds of this Rozzini kneeled on the floor by Harris' feet and ran his hand quickly up Harris' inseam to wake him up from the dream. Harris took a quick breath in and looked around the room.
"You dream you dream, senore, like Virgil our poet. And his spirit smiles at you, but I do not think this one will be a reality."
Harris raised his dark, virile eyebrows and watched Rozzini return to his work, his fingers floating magically across the seams and cuffs of the suit.

The end of the business day arrived and Rozzini was finishing a stitch in a blazer when his phone rang.
"Alo?"
"Rozzini?"
"Ciao, Tamado, my friend, how goes it?"
"A man called Harris came to see me today."
Rozzini's forehead furrowed, he recognized the name but in his senility had forgotten why it sounded familiar.
"A man named who?" he asked.
"Harris."
"Harris?"
"Yes, Harris."
He pauses, getting lost in the folds of what looks like a thousand shirts hanging from the ceiling of his shop. He blinks and tries to sound like he remembers.
"Harris, oh yes yes, Harris."
"He mentioned an event to me that I found interesting but a little, ehm, disquieting."
"Oh, Harris!" Rozzini triumphantly remembered, "disquieting?"
"Did he propose to you that we make suits for one another to raise money for the town at the festival?"
"Yah yah that is what he said. He said it would bring many people and that we could raise money for the schools and the church."
"What do you think of it?" Tamado asked.
"I know our children need new desks at the primary school," Rozzini said, "and that the windows at the church have needed a cleaning since Virgil's wake," he chuckled, "And this man Harris is very passionate about the idea, as a tribute somehow..."
"Tribute?"
"Yah yah, that it would be for the festival of Virgil if we did this."
Then a feeling arose in Rozzini, a youthful, wise, absurd kind of feeling. He felt it in his knees and thighs and shoulders, a fuzziness, a warmth, and it produced a smile on his face. It was as if the universe were contained in its entirety within that moment, on the phone with Tamado, and all the little particulars of his being came together for him to feel all at once, his 84 years mushed warmly into one emotion. It caused him to say,
"I think we should it, my friend."
An electricity ran through his fingers.
"We should?" asked Tamado.
"Yah yah, I will call Harris to tell him we will do it."

It is the day of the festival. On a stage in the center of the Round Square stand the mayor of Piedigrotta and Harris. They wave to a large crowd, the townspeople and tourists talking at a pleasant volume to one another. Next to Harris stands Rozzini and Tamado wearing smock-like drapes of suit cloth ready to be tailored. The mayor points to the two men, who nod in response. They face one another to begin.
At first the men reach for the same places, trying to measure and mark each other, but their hands hit. Their heads bump, and several people chuckle in the crowd. The men stand back from one another and take a breath. They try again and, after several more comical interferences, Rozzini kneels to do the cuffs of Tamado's pants and Tamado, simultaneously, measures the neck of Rozzini's blazer. They find that they can fit together. After this they examine one another's sleeves, each taking the opposite arm to compliment the other, and it becomes a harmonic dance between them, each of them bending to match and comprimse with the other's movements.
The audience is captivated, and after ten minutes, the tailors stand back from one another, looking each other up and down, and they nod and face the crowd. They audience cheers and yells their names in the same collective breath as the name of Virgil--as if the two men are, in their fitted harmony, a sartorial avatar of the poet himself.