Italy->Venezuela->San Francisco.On the mend --A stroke endangers tailor's livelihood -- but not his spirit

<a href=www.sfgate.com>SFGate.com Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, April 18, 2003

Gabriele Mariotti has always had nimble hands, an amazing eye for detail, and a knack for drawing the most out of a fine swath of cloth.

But these days, the Italian tailor speaks with hesitation. He has difficulty moving his left hand and shoulder. He needs help climbing the stairs of his home in the Sunset District of San Francisco.

In mid-March, a sign was posted on the window of his shop in Mill Valley, announcing its closure due to a family emergency. A stroke had paralyzed the left side of his body. He has since regained some movement, but his body is stiff and his hand feels clumsy.

His health had been excellent -- no history of high blood pressure or high cholesterol -- but his father and grandfather had strokes.

"It's like a car that runs all the time for years," he said. "And then one day it doesn't work anymore."

Mariotti, 70, grew up in poverty in an Italian village. In the early 1960s, he moved to the Bay Area and became a success story. For 36 years he has run his small shop, Giovanni of Italy, at the Strawberry Village shopping center --

serving customers in southern Marin. It was too costly to change the name of the shop when he bought it from another tailor, so many of his customers assume that Giovanni is his first name.

"He has beautiful hands. His hands did such wonderful work. . . . He put my daughter through school," said the tailor's wife, Ana Maria. "Your hands have to be very precise, like a painter's. It's an art, I think. And if you enjoy it, you do it with passion."

She is struggling to pay the bills, including the rent on his shop, while he tries to recuperate with physical therapy.

"He's a very determined man. He loves his trade," she said, trying to stay calm. "He'd love to go back to work, but it's a lot of pressure to be in business, and I don't think he needs that."

The tailor views the shopping center beside Highway 101 as a village -- a place where he feels at home with shopkeepers. "When I go there, everybody knows me and I know them," he said. "I like the interaction of the customers --

good and bad. People come in, they talk about movies. We tell stories. We make a funny." Some of his customers are from families who have brought clothes to him for three generations. Mariotti loves seeing a high-quality fabric or finely stitched piece of clothing. "Molto bene," he would whisper and nod. Very well done.

He misses the simple things: stopping by the deli for coffee, buying a Lotto ticket at the market, dickering over the price with a customer.

"Have you ever known a tailor to die rich?" he would ask.

He was also in the habit of stopping by an Italian bakery in North Beach to buy amaretti. And he would show up at Marin Joe's restaurant in Corte Madera to sip a glass of wine and banter in Italian with the owner, Romano Della Santina.

"He's a simple guy, very conscientious. A hard worker. He was doing beautiful work and didn't even charge that much," Della Santina said. "He's a terrific guy with a lot of talent. I love the guy."

Although frustrated, the tailor has clung to his sense of humor.

"He's the authentic Italian," his wife said. "No matter how old he is, he's always looking at girls. He's very flirtatious with the nurses. They know he just likes to do that for fun."

And he still has a flair for language. His native tongue is Italian, but he also speaks Spanish and English. "The beautiful thing is that he speaks the three languages together at the same time," his wife said. "People would really laugh about it. He would laugh, too."

One client, Suzanna Schomaker of San Rafael, dropped by his shop with her alterations on the way to her office in San Francisco. Mariotti wouldn't charge her for quick and easy items like fixing a shoulder strap on a bra.

"The very funny thing about him was that he was so hard to understand. His wife would be the interpreter," Schomaker said. "And they're so in love. Imagine working with someone 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- and still acting like they just met."

Mariotti's wife calls him Amore. They talk mostly in her native tongue: Spanish.

He grew up in the village of Loreto Aprutino in the Abruzzo region in central Italy. He was the eldest of three children. His father served in the Italian army in World War II and was taken prisoner in Africa. At age 9, Gabriele became the man of the house.

His village was occupied by the Germans. Food was scarce. His mother made bread to feed the family. Gabriele picked fruit and divided it with his mother,

brother and sister.

After the war, his father returned home and sent Gabriele to a village tailor, where he served an apprenticeship for eight years.

"Tailoring is like an art. You never finish learning," Mariotti said. "You keep learning from the new styles coming."

At 21, he moved to Caracas, Venezuela, in search of work and fun. "Going to South America, I felt free, because the customs for men and women are very free," he said with lust in his eyes. "It's not like living in a village."

Several years later, he returned to Italy. In 1963, he boarded a passenger ship for America, landing in New York. He stayed in Baltimore for four months before heading to the Bay Area.

He lived in San Mateo and worked for a year for a custom tailor who made suits for the elite. He also worked for a year in Belmont, and then briefly as a manager at Macy's in Palo Alto.

Ana Maria grew up in El Salvador. In 1957, she joined her mother in San Francisco, where she went to school and worked for an insurance firm before snagging a long-term job with Wells Fargo.

Mariotti met his future wife at a party in San Francisco in 1969. "At the time, I was like a butterfly. But I kept looking at her," he said.

"He didn't speak Spanish very well. Just the bad words," she joked. "I straightened him out."

She took him to the opera, but he was asked to leave because of his snoring.

They ate at their favorite restaurant, Fugazzi, and then went dancing. They hiked in the hills and watched sunsets.

In 1972, they were married at her mother's house in the Sunset District. A year later, they bought a house on Lawton Street, where they have lived for 30 years. They have one daughter: Rosanna Maria Mariotti, 26, a science teacher at San Francisco's Lincoln High School.

"My husband was a very hard-working man. He worked for at least 12 hours a day," his wife said. "It saddened me that he came home very late. I didn't know that something worse was going to happen. That's life."

At his shop, Mariotti's wife handled most of his paperwork and customer relations. "If he wasn't satisfied with his work," she said, "he'd tell the customers, 'I want to do it over again. Would you mind waiting a few days?' "

Before his stroke, the tailor used to enjoy walking in Golden Gate Park. He loved to garden and work on his daisies. Once in a while, he would meet with a handful of other Italian tailors in the city. Mariotti used to wear a business suit to work. In recent years he had become more casual, but he still made a point of wearing a tie each day.

"We would have lunch once in a while. He did a lot of work for me," said customer Henry Timnick. "There's something about Old World competence. The tailors are gone, and it's a shame. The last of the great artisans with their hands."

The stroke hit on the morning of March 14, when Mariotti was at home. The tailor spent the next three weeks at St. Mary's Medical Center on Stanyan Street, where Dr. Stanley Yarnell presided over his care.

"He couldn't move his left side. He couldn't see. He couldn't eat. He was more vegetable than anything," his wife said. "For a while he couldn't even drink liquids. They had him on an IV . . . After a few days, he was beginning to move his hand. It's a blessing. He could barely speak, but his mind was sharp. He was remembering all the customers, and he felt bad that he wasn't able to have their pieces ready for them."

He was put on a rigorous program of occupational, speech and physical therapy. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for his hospital stay, but he does not have long-term disability insurance.

Two weeks ago, he returned home, where he receives physical therapy four mornings a week. He has been able to start flexing his left hand, but it is not agile. "I can probably do an easy job, but not what I'm used to," he said. "To do a fine job, the tailoring is very precise. I need my left hand."

Mariotti insists that he will be back to work in a matter of weeks or months. But his wife doesn't know if he will ever work again.

"I keep him walking and doing exercises. I keep him engaged in conversation.

He's learning to go up and down the stairs," she said. "In about a year, God willing, he'll be fine."

When he gets discouraged, Mariotti cuddles Bebe, a stray cat that showed up at the house nine years ago. Bebe's tigerlike coat reminds him of a cat that was lost in the war when he was a boy.

"Each day I feel a little more equilibrium," Mariotti said after walking across the living room with a cane and his wife's arm to steady him. "What I couldn't do yesterday, I can do tomorrow."

So the shop lights remain off. A couple of potted plants and a small American flag sit in the window. A few unclaimed alterations wait on hangers.

"We may have to close the store for a while, and if, God willing he goes back to work, we'll reopen it. And hopefully the shopping center will have a space for him," she said. "At least those are his dreams. And I say, 'Yes, that will happen.' He has to have something to dream about."

E-mail Jim Doyle at jdoyle@sfchronicle.com.