HAVING POURED OIL INTO A LARGE, DEEP POT, AND SET IT over a quiet flame, she sets out for a quick tour of the garden and the meadow just as we are arriving. Shedding coats and shawls, greeting one another as though years have passed since last Thursday night, we see to the table, to the filling of the wine jugs from the demijohn of red sitting in the corner. One of us lays uncut loaves of new bread on the table, another pokes about to see what it is that Miranda has cooking over the hearth fire though none of us dares to put a hand to anything without her command.
Her breath a bit short from fervour for her mission, Miranda returns holding her apron together with two hands and in its hollow there are what must be the last of the string beans – green and yellow – the first of the brussels sprouts, the chopped-off long leafy heads of celery, apples, zucchini blossoms, sage. Two brown-skinned pears she has stuffed into her sweater pockets for tomorrow’s breakfast.
‘Out of my way, via, via,’ she says, pushing us aside, bussing cheeks as she passes each one, then sets to the tasks of rinsing and drying and trimming, preparing her bounty for glory. All of us familiar with her frying dance, we surround her, hungry children in her thrall.
Starting with the celery leaves, dragging the branches a few at a time into a batter no thicker than cream, she slips the dripping things into the hot oil, letting them be until they rise to the surface of the now bubbling oil, the force of which turns them over – without a prod – to crust the other side of them. Her feet anchored in place, the whole of Miranda’s generous upper body sways, her hands flying over the leaves and the blossoms and the beans to the batter, to the pot, lifting batch after batch from the oil with a wide skimmer, turning the gilded stuff out to rest on a long, flat pan lined with a tea towel. We pass the pan among us, devouring the fritters out of our hands, burning fingers, burning mouths, and have barely placed the empty pan back to her reach – we still chewing and sipping and moaning – as Miranda piles it with another batch. And another. She saves apple peelings and sage leaves for the last, since these are what she, herself, craves most. As she lifts these onto the pan and moves the frying pot off the heat, she turns to us, taking a long pull from the glass of white someone slaps into her hand. Then Miranda eats, drinks.
‘Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, I like the wine cold, nearly gone to ice following the hot shattering crust in my mouth, the contrast sending one’s whole body into ecstasy,’ she tells us. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever served a frittura at the table. No time to get it there since I’m always on to the next round of dragging things through the batter, slipping them into the oil, lifting them out dark and crisp. I prefer everyone gathered around the pot, waiting.’
Sighing and laughing and crunching and sipping, Miranda asks for more wine. The three bottles of white (a rare luxury is ‘bought wine’ on Thursday nights), which she’d cooled in a tub of supermarket ice, are dead soldiers. Someone suggests we drink the bottle of Champagne that has been lying on its side in some cupboard for months, a bottle from some lesser-known house in Reims, which was gifted – read: lifted – by one of the truckers among Miranda’s admirers.
‘Shouldn’t it be drunk cold?’ she wants to know but two of the men are already fiddling with the foil, the wire, shouting ‘Attenzione, attenzione,’ though the cork slides out with a quiet plunk. We pour it, flat and sour, into one another’s tumblers, toasting Miranda and the thieving trucker. They go quiet, all of them, searching for some motive to compliment their first taste of ‘real French’ when Miranda says, ‘Yeasty stuff, we might better have made bread with it.’
I begin a cliffs-notes version of the story of Dom Pérignon and the sometime glories of what came to be la méthode champenoise but Miranda couldn’t be less interested. She says, ‘Leave a monk in a cellar and there’s bound to be a travesty.’
Flailing her toasting fork now, she bosses us into our places at table, stoops down then to the small hearth on the wall behind it to turn the thick, spluttering slabs of pancetta, which have been slowly crisping on a grate over olivewood embers and branches of wild sage. Sitting deep in the red-hot ash below the grate is a long, shallow terracotta baking dish of potatoes, small as a thumbnail, and the luscious sage-smelling fat drips over them. From the pocket of her pinafore she takes a handful of dried wild fennel flowers, rubs them between her palms over the potatoes, and the maddening perfumes they send up cause sighs of longing from us. Struggling to rise from her bent position, steadying herself with one hand on the mantel, once she is upright, Miranda-of-the-Bosoms is flushed with delight. For the pancetta, for the potatoes. For her frying dance and because it’s Thursday. Likely for much more than that.
‘Quasi, quasi – almost, almost,’ Miranda laughs over her shoulder, her great beautiful form juddering back behind the faded flowery bedsheet that secludes the kitchen from the dining room in the tiny derelict and woodsmoked house she calls her rustico.
It’s a Thursday in a long-ago October. And in this squat stone building, which sits on the verges of the Montefiascone road, we are nine still-hungry souls awaiting supper. Four women – five including myself – form the core group and, tonight, we are joined by four men: two husbands, the widower of a former member, and a lover, the last being Miranda’s long-time friend, Filiberto.
The ten small tables at which Miranda’s guests sit to dine on other evenings in the week have been pushed together into one, the diversity of their heights and widths smoothed over in green-checked oilcloth. Under sheaves of dried olive branches that hang from the slouching, split-beamed ceiling barely a metre above our heads, we sit on plank benches and half-broken chairs along its length. A merry troupe, having our way with Miranda’s purple wine, passing along a thin-bladed knife and a two-kilo round of her crusty sourish bread, still warm from the wood-fired oven in the back garden, each of us saws off a trencher, passes it to the person on their right. When everyone has bread, we tear it into pieces, wet the pieces in the wine, and chew the fine pap with gusto. Pane e vino, bread and wine.
We slide further into our cups, wet more bread in more wine until Miranda parts the bedsheet curtain – keeping it pinned to the wall with a tilt of her hip – and comes forth holding a great steaming basin of wild porcini braised in red wine and tomato. Into small deep white bowls she spoons the mushrooms with their dark potent juices and directs someone to fetch more bread and another to remove the pancetta from the grate and lay it over the potatoes where it’ll stay warm without burning. She asks if the wine jugs are full, then serves herself. We raise tumblers and voices in buon appetito and the house goes silent as stone save for low-pitched salacious murmurings.
We share in the clearing of plates and the resetting of others. One of the Thursday night rules is: Once the supper begins, Miranda will not leave her chair at the table until the meal is finished. And so, with two kitchen towels against its heat, I lift the pan of pancetta and potatoes from the embers and take it round the table for everyone to serve themselves. Next, one of us fetches from the kitchen two large chipped Deruta platters piled with chicken crusted in wild herbs – rosemary, oregano, fennel seeds, fennel flowers and thyme – and roasted with crushed tomatoes and olive oil, the whole of it doused in white wine toward the end of its cooking time. We fight over the pan juices and before we’re ready to surrender the platters – crusts poised for a last swipe – someone whisks them away behind the curtain. Coitus interruptus. We suffer the noise of furtive slurpings. Then frenzied scrapings of the roasting pan left behind in the sink.
‘The chicory is outside in the bread oven,’ Miranda says to no one in particular, knowing that someone will run to get it. This between-course bustle with too many of us trying to help seems always a four-minute farce, everyone bent on getting back to the table.
To complete the savoury part of the supper, Miranda has rolled steamed chunks of autumn squash in cornmeal and pan-fried them in olive oil. Only a whisper of sea salt and a grinding of pepper scent them, consenting to yet more sage leaves – sautéed in oil this time – which exalt the natural richness of the squash rather than conceal it with sugar and spices. Nothing much gets a mask in Miranda’s kitchen. This reprise of sage – first, battered and fried, then to scent the pancetta and the potatoes and now with the squash – is an example of Miranda’s theory of the filo conduttore: literally, the conducting thread. Often she uses an element more than once in a meal, thus connecting the various dishes, coaxing them into a harmonious whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Aristotle knew.
Though Miranda almost never prepares a traditional dessert on Thursday nights, sometimes, when she’s set ewe’s-milk ricotta in a sieve to drain overnight, she’ll place a lush, creamy pat of it on a yellow plate, a big hunk of honeycomb and a pepper mill beside it, and everyone will take a tablespoonful or so in a teacup, break a piece of the comb over the ricotta, and grind on pepper with a heavy hand. Without fail, ricotta or not, she always reaches into the armoire where she keeps flour and sugar and dried beans, and takes out a fine old metal tin. Oval in shape, its pale blue and silver paint left only in patches, it’s always filled with tozzetti, hard, twice-baked biscuits made with whatever nuts or fruit or seeds she has to hand. These and a good ambered vin santo in which to wet them, that’s how Miranda ends Thursday nights. We began our supper by dipping bread in wine and end with the same gesture. Amen.
Patting his chin with a napkin, Filiberto then lays the square of tattered blue cloth flat on the table; after smoothing and folding it into a small triangle, he places it in the pocket of his woollen shirt. Another of the Thursday night rules is: Anyone who wants one brings their own napkin. He rises then, walks to Miranda’s place, takes her hand in his and, in the style of the old cavaliers, brings it close to his lips without touching it. Turning from her, he strides the few metres to a chair set near the hearth and takes up his waiting mandolin, and begins plucking the strings in a minor key. One of the two shepherds who tend the flocks on the far-flung meadows of this parish on the Montefiascone road, Filiberto sings, his voice a cracked whisper. Hoarse, ragged.
Miranda shuts her eyes, totters her chair back on its hind legs and, as though all of us and even the little room itself have fallen away, she is alone with Filiberto and his tender wail. His voice, his music, are her after-supper prize on Thursday nights. Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of abundance, la Madonna of the burners in a kitchen-towel turban, Juno-esque breasts, soft and brown, bursting from the bodice of a white pinafore as she rocks her chair like a cradle, its creaking keeping time with Filiberto’s plucking. When he stops, she rouses, and her old rheumy eyes are drenched blue-black flowers flitting from one to another of us with what seems like regret. She sips the heel of her vin santo, runs a hand across her cheek, pinches her upper lip, pats her kitchen-towel turban. Miranda has been consenting to the age seventy-six for several years now but I think one of her recent birthdays was her eightieth.
It was a cold January night when I first met Miranda, six years ago now. While still living in the stable in San Casciano, Fernando and I were in the thick of our search for our ‘next house’; somehow we found ourselves accidental guests at a festival to honour Sant’Antonio Abate – Saint Anthony the Abbot – in a tiny Umbrian village near the hilltown of Orvieto. A wooden crate of just-baked bread balanced picturesquely on her head, Miranda had gone about the little festa swinging her prosperous hips, causing the men to pause in their quaffing and orating whenever she passed by. I remember one man in particular would bite the side of a forefinger each time she came near. A forceful gesture this, indicator of many sentiments. But that man’s motive for finger-biting was undeniably desire.
As it turned out, we soon found our ‘next house’ – in Orvieto – and waited out the two years it wanted to restore it; for all that time and ever since, Miranda has been an affectionate and generous presence in our lives. My first Umbrian friend, my enduring one. When I was too-long kitchenless she put the keys to the rustico in my hand, invited me to complete the work of testing recipes for a manuscript perilously overdue. And when Fernando and I finally moved into Number 34 Via del Duomo, again it was she who swanned me through the markets, introduced me to the farmers, helped me – the first American ever to set up in Orvieto full-time – to slash a path through the spiny cultural labyrinth of the centro storico, the town’s historic centre. Always there, Miranda was. Always near in the Umbrian way of being near. Close by but not too close.
Miranda and I have spent untold hours – we two, alone, and in the company of others – working and talking, laughing ourselves to tears and then weeping ourselves back to laughter, cooking and baking and sitting down to supper. And when she asks, I give a hand in preparing the suppers she serves in the rustico on three or four nights other than Thursday when Miranda hosts twelve or so people. Her guests on those nights are mostly locals who live alone, truckers passing through or couples living on ‘caffe latte pensions’ – a sum that barely allows them to put supper on their own tables and would prohibit any thought of dining out. For all of them the handwrought sign – Miranda – swinging from a metal arm above her old green door and backlit by a flame in an iron lantern announces a kind of sanctuary, the broken-down castle keep on the Montefiascone road.
Miranda cooks whatever she has, whatever others have brought to her. No bill is brought to the tables at the end of the evening. People leave what they can, be it a few euros, eggs wrapped in newspaper, a sack of just-dug potatoes smudged in wet red earth, or a crate of artichokes, their round barbed heads lolling on thirty-centimetre leafy stems. The arrangement works. Miranda makes it work.
I think of all this and wonder what troubles Miranda-of-the-Bosoms this evening, why her eyes shine with tears that won’t fall.
Still sitting by the hearth, Filiberto wonders, too. ‘Amore mio,’ he says, looking over at her, ‘are you not feeling so well?’
‘Sto bene. Sto veramente bene ma,’ she says. ‘I’m well, truly well, but …’
‘Well then, what is it?’ asks Gilda. A delicate fifty-something beauty, Gilda’s face seems made of white silk in which her amber eyes have burned great round holes. ‘I can also see you are a bit down.’
‘I think it’s a matter of fatigue. Our little Miranda is doing too much. Maybe there should be a nice interval in our Thursday nights,’ says Ninuccia, a stout red-haired women with gorgeous grey eyes and a tendency to rule. The tribe’s portatrice della verità, the carrier of truths, Ninuccia knows what is and what isn’t and rarely is she disputed.
All’ Italiana, everyone around the table begins to speak at once, each one hearing only themselves. No one wants to surrender the Thursday suppers nor do they disagree that Miranda should be doing less. At least for a while. The rumpus builds until she commands quiet.
‘My nephews have promised to do a bit of work on this old place. Not much, mind you – shoring up the beams, laying down a truckload of antique tiles one of them bought from an auction in Viterbo. Some paint. Even though they’ll be working only in the evenings, I should think a month would be enough. Sometime after the raccolta they should be finished. The olives will be ripe enough to harvest by mid-November this year, wouldn’t you say?’
A murmur of accord. ‘Yes, after the harvest and before the first snow, the boys should be finished.’
‘Benissimo. And then we will resume our rhythm,’ says Pierangelo, who is Ninuccia’s husband. The last words he tilts upward in question.
‘Actually, I had more than an intervallo in mind,’ Miranda says, not looking up. ‘I’ve been thinking to close down the rustico.’ Crushing a crust of bread against the green and white oilcloth, she lifts her empty glass to her lips, trying to sip from it.
Thunder rumbles the room.
‘No, no, I mean close it down except for our Thursdays,’ she hastens to explain. ‘I won’t be opening up on the other nights. That’s what I mean.’
Over the others who chant praises to the saints, Miranda is still trying to be heard. ‘But if we do start up again … when we start up again, I won’t be cooking. I want you to know that. I’ll be here to help. We’ll keep the same system, everyone contributing what they can to make the supper. For a while there’ll be little enough growing in anyone’s orto save pumpkins and black cabbage and cauliflower, but persimmons will be ripe by November, and pomegranates. If everyone would leave a few porcini to dry, we’d have a windfall for winter suppers. But dry them right. Better, bring them to me and I’ll string them up, let them swing from the beams in my attic.’
‘I’ll have leeks even after the snow,’ says Ninuccia. ‘And I’ve a cellarful of apples and potatoes. Everyone’s got chestnuts.’
‘Good. Bravissimi. But remember, only what’s fine,’ Miranda cautions.
A Thursday night rule: Humble or rich, always offer only the best of what you have.
‘And whoever can spare something from his hunt, well, feel free to hang the haunches, or the beasts entire, in the cheese hut out back. Birds, hare, boar. Remember to wrap a hoof or a foot or a wing with the date, written legibly, so we’ll know the order in which to use them.’
‘No need to date a bird, Miranda. Once it’s putrid, it speaks for itself.’
‘You’re just about reaching the putrid stage yourself, Iacovo,’ Miranda assures a handsome man in a hand-knitted black sweater, navy basque and grey canvas trousers tucked into knee-high boots – the same hand-knitted black sweater, navy basque and grey canvas trousers tucked into the same knee-high boots he’s been wearing summer and winter, it’s been observed, since the day his wife passed away half a decade before.
‘For the last years of his life, Michelangelo never took his boots off, my darling girl,’ Iacovo tells her. ‘It’s in deference to him that keeps me night and day in mine.’
‘Bah. Where was I? Yes, the wine and the oil will be here, wood for the fire, for the bread oven.’
‘And the pecorino,’ Filiberto says. ‘There’ll always be cheese.’
Miranda looks at Filiberto, blows him a kiss.
‘Certo, certo, you’ve done more than your share and now we’ll … we’ll take over. Take turns.’ As usual, it’s Ninuccia who decides for all of us.
Once again, everyone speaks at the same time, all of them agreeing that Miranda should indeed retire from her stance in front of the old iron stove. ‘Yes, yes, of course, è giusto, giustissimo, it’s right, very right,’ they repeat again and again though their voices and the pace of their words wane, their conviction a diminishing chord. A tentative whistle in the dark. They are bewildered babes who’ve lost their piper.
A soft but unshy voice makes a small rip in the silence.
‘I’ll cook.’
The voice is mine.
I have just offered to prepare supper for as many as fourteen people once a week in a place with no electricity or gas. I shall cook over the three holes of a wood-and-coal-fired stove and a length of chicken wire stretched between the andirons of a Lilliputian hearth. The people who will come to eat what I cook – some of them of a certain age – are culinary traditionalists, old-school Umbrians who work the land, shepherd flocks, raise courtyard animals, hunt birds and wild boar, and have never in their impressively long existences eaten an egg plucked from a carton but always from under the warm derrière of a hen. Rigid are their gastronomic formulas: a rabbit is either tugged through a small hill of flour and fried in bubbling lard or wrapped in pancetta, roasted with rosemary and splashed stintingly with white wine once it’s been carried to the table; this last ceremony giving up luscious vapours, which settle back to rest deep in the beast’s soft, hot flesh. Chicken is chopped into small pieces, roasted with crushed tomatoes, olive oil and handfuls of wild herbs. It gets its white-wine sousing halfway through the cooking. A Sunday chicken can be pan-sautéed with yellow capsicums and fat black olives. Oregano is the prescribed herb to scent it. Lamb, a leg or a shoulder, is roasted with potatoes. Its tiny ribs are charred fast over a wood fire. The only sauce is olive oil – green as sun-struck jade – splashed in small, lustrous puddles through which one skates the flesh, the fat, the bones, the potatoes, the bread. In the last best drops, one skates a finger. Pig, suckling or mature, is roasted with sage and rosemary and often, but not always, with wild fennel, or, yet more ubiquitously, it is boned, stuffed with a poultice of its innards, run through with a metal rod and rotated over a slow fire until its skin, glistening like rubbed mahagony, is brittle as caramel gone cold.
The rural folks’ bible is long, its codes chiselled in Umbrian stone. I am not Umbrian. My own bible is a crucible, a composite of riches gathered from all the places where I’ve lived and worked and cooked. Even for these canonical Umbrians, I know I shall be wilfully tempted to blasphemy. I might sauté a rabbit with wild thyme and shallots in the rich, salty fat rendered from wild herb-perfumed lard, splash it with good black beer, braise it until its plump flesh goes bronze as August wheat and, if barely prodded with a single tine of a fork, falls from its bones in succulent heaps. Worse than this, I will likely serve the same black beer to drink as the one in which the rabbit was drowned. In other words, I shall cook for these Umbrians in the way that is natural for me. This feels right. In fact, it feels wonderful.
It must feel right to Miranda as well, her broad smile making glittering blue-black slits of her eyes. She’s laughing now, her kitchen-towel turban – singed in some earlier combat with the flames – sits askew and wilting in the smoky mists of the dying fire. I notice that it’s only Miranda who laughs.
‘I thought you would, Chou,’ she says. ‘In fact, it’s you I’ve had in mind to … ever since Rai Uno showed that old film, La Festa di Babette. Since then, well, I’ve been thinking that we’re like those locals who’d lived on salt cod and water and that you could be her, that Babette woman, sitting us down to some strange supper on a Thursday. La Festa di Babette.’
‘You’ve hardly fared on fish and water all these years,’ I say, raising my glass. Everyone follows suit and we drink to the health and joy of the goddess of Buonrespiro.
‘Brava, Miranda, bravissima, bravissima.’ Everyone’s on their feet, coming to surround her, kissing, embracing, placing their hands on her sweat-shined cheeks. Miranda has ruled her tribe justly and so merits their love. But the brio quietens perhaps too quickly and, once back at their places, they resume a collective sulk, one fidgeting with his ring, one flicking a middle finger and thumb against errant crumbs. Some fix a perplexed gaze in my direction, as though I was someone else, someone new. Which, in a way, is what I am. Being someone new is who an expatriate is always.
Though I’ve known these souls who compose Miranda’s famous Thursday suppers for all the years I’ve lived in Orvieto – at least to greet in the markets or wherever our paths cross – it was only last spring that she first invited Fernando and I to join the ranks of her inner circle. But more than the longevity I lack, it’s my straniera, my stranger, status that worries them. How, oh how, can l’Americana slip into the old white clogs of their beloved Miranda?
I know better than they that I can’t. But what I know that they don’t is that I have no wish to. It’s not Miranda’s shoes I’ll try to fill; I’ve got shoes of my own. I like that Miranda sensed I would offer to cook. So often I have made her privy to this longing of mine for a large family around my table. I suspect she, too, knows the others would make a muddle of taking turns. ‘A good hearth has only one Vesta,’ she always says when, unbidden, someone dares insist upon her territory.
The fire’s gone cold and the little room is nearly dark save the last flames hurled up by the guttering candles. One of the Thursday night rules says: When the candles are spent, the evening is over. No one moves to leave.
The deeper the dark, the looser their tongues. A triangular dialogue prevails among Ninuccia, the woman called Paolina, and the one called Gilda. We listen.
‘I don’t know this film. Come si chiama?’ asks Ninuccia.
‘La Festa di Babette; it’s a pretty film, pretty enough but …’ says Gilda.
‘I saw it, too. This cook killed a turtle; after I saw that scene – enough,’ says Paolina.
‘Did she cook it over the ashes?’ asks Ninuccia.
‘I think she made a broth,’ Gilda tells her.
‘I’ll tell you right off, I don’t eat such things,’ says Paolina.
‘Nor do I,’ Ninuccia agrees. ‘But what else did she serve?’
‘Maybe it would please you to eat a quail suffocated inside a thousand-layer pastry coffin,’ Paolina says.
‘Davvero schifoso. Truly disgusting,’ Ninuccia says. ‘The lowest circle in hell should be reserved for people who play with food.’
Truly disgusting – they are all in agreement and as I listen to them I am sympathetic. Braised quail tucked inside buttery pastry caskets seem a trumpery to them, as it seemed a trumpery to me not so many years ago as I sat at El Bulli wondering why I wasn’t in front of some small tottering table in the ancient village of Sarrià hung high in the hills above Barcelona, dragging charred baby leeks, thin as my finger, into a little pot of romesco, rather than staring at a menu that promised Kellogg’s paella – Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-scented mashed potatoes – or sizzled embryonic eels afloat in espresso foam. The world is rife with the hungry and yet big-boy chefs must play with food. I think about what Ninuccia has just said: The lowest circle in hell should be reserved for people who play with food. I would add: especially those who play with food and get paid for it. But is that what these Umbrians are supposing I shall do?
My reverie is broken by Ninuccia, herself, who is asking me, ‘So will Thursdays be like in the film? Is that what we can expect?’
‘No. Not at all like in the film. I’m not like her. Not so much like Babette. (I was not telling the whole truth here … hence, the hesitation, almost the admittance that I am very much like Babette in that I have and I would again spend my last lire to feed you … and more … one good supper taken together is a symbol of everything that matters in life.) I promise you a good supper. We’ll be together. Every week on the same night. Something to count on. Ritual. Ceremony. Continuance. The idea is pure Umbrian. But the food … well, the food can’t be if I’m cooking it. I don’t have your history, your hand. But I have another history, my own hand … will you give me a chance?’
The stillness is brief, electric. It’s Gilda who interrupts it. ‘Why not? It would be, well, it might be interesting.’
‘Why not? Because things should remain as they are.’ This is Ninuccia.
‘But there is no more as they are – as they are has become as they were. Weren’t you listening to Miranda?’ Gilda wants to know.
No one speaks. Gilda continues, ‘Doesn’t anyone recall Tancredi’s words to Don Fabrizio? If you want things to stay the same, everything must change.’
‘And that signifies?’ Ninuccia rises, brushes absent crumbs from the table with the side of her hand.
‘That the present can’t be preserved like a bushel of apricots tumbled into jars and drowned in rum, Ninuccia. That’s what it signifies. There’s no defending the present against change. Tonight is already part of the past. It’s …’
‘Calma, calma, it’s not the Risorgimento at stake here – it’s supper we’re talking about.’ This is Iacovo, the widower.
‘I say Chou should cook. Miranda says Chou should cook.’ This from Gilda.
Disarmed, Ninuccia speaks quietly, ‘Forse, perhaps …’
‘Certainly, she’s clever, but …’ Paolina remains unconvinced.
Arms resting on the shelf of her bosom, her gaze serene, Miranda is an indulgent mother observing her children in fraternal combat. When she speaks, it’s to Filiberto. ‘Cosa dici? What do you say?’
As she knew he would, Filiberto has a solution. ‘Perhaps Chou could take on a collaboratrice each week. A different partner every Thursday. A rotation of the local talent working alongside her. A joining of ways and means. Of histories. A little like Ravel played with four hands instead of two.’
Lanterns along the Montefiascone road spill tarnished yellow light through the single window of the darkened room and we are a tribe in shadow. In a state of Umbrian impasse.
At last, it’s Ninuccia who speaks. ‘I wonder, Miranda, if you would consider just one more Thursday night before … before we begin this … this new regime. This variation on Ravel.’
Ninuccia stands as she asks this, goes to Miranda, adjusts her towel turban. Filiberto is on his feet, too, gone to rummage the drawers in the armoire. Breaking the candle rule, he lights two more and goes to stir up the fire.
‘One more?’ Miranda’s voice seems made of both laughter and tears.
Enlivened by the new light and as much by Ninuccia’s apppeal for clemency, everyone’s talking again, shouting out dishes like bingo numbers, foods Miranda hasn’t lately cooked or ones she’s somehow never cooked at all.
‘I’ve yet to say I will. That I will cook for one more Thursday.’ Miranda knows the only way to capture their attention is to whisper. The talk ceases. Barely raising her volume, Miranda says, ‘Bring me a haunch of young boar by Sunday evening, a litre of decent brandy and a package of syringes.’
‘Syringes?’ Half seconds separate each one saying the same word.
‘You heard me.’ Her wistfulness spent, Miranda begins to play with us. The boar season officially underway, she looks first to Pierangelo, then to Iacovo, both fervent hunters. Their assignment is clear and each mumbles va bene, va bene.
‘Sarà fatto, it shall be done,’ Iacovo confirms. ‘But why the syringes?’
There is neither a repeat of the question nor one who answers it. No one seems to know.
‘Tell them, my little American.’ The blue-black eyes hold mine in silent trust that I will understand what she has in mind. Miranda’s challenge is waged not to demonstrate my comfort with the most obscure local culinary patrimony but to spur the others’ nostalgia for it. The troupe turns to me, still as a Bruegel vignette.
Very quietly, I take up the gauntlet that Miranda has thrown to me.
‘To inject the boar with the brandy. Syringe after syringe of brandy until the flesh is drenched, saturated. Rub the haunch with crushed juniper and let it sit for a few days. Some salt. Nothing else. Roasted over olive and grape woods, the natural sugars from the brandy seep out to form a brittle crust, which keeps the flesh lush. Pan juices. No sauce. The French roast sanglier in the same way.’
‘You were doing just fine until you brought in the French. Remember who taught them to cook,’ Miranda is saying to me over a chorus of, ‘Certo, certo, of course, of course … Once upon a time, we always roasted boar in that way.’
‘But who had brandy?’
‘And who had syringes?’
‘Grappa. Just make incisions, pour on the grappa and massage the beast. A little more grappa, another massage.’ This is Iacovo.
‘Brandy is what it wants,’ Miranda insists, ‘and only by injecting it can the brandy wet the flesh all the way through. You’ll have nothing on your plates but the boar, its crust and its juices. Afterward, a few leaves of whatever grasses I can still find in the meadow.’
I listen and marvel yet again at Miranda’s understanding of the human condition. This brandy-boar-syringe act she calculated not to elevate me from the tribe but to include me. She knew that all of them knew what I knew, save two particulars. That I knew of the two particulars that they did not was instantly dispersed into their reminiscences. Without causing the barest nick in their Umbrian pride, Miranda might have managed to pull my chair a millimetre closer to the Thursday table.
‘And before?’ Ninuccia wants to know. ‘I think we should have nothing more than a simple soup …’
‘Only a simple soup – our usual refrain …’ This is Miranda.
‘Roasted chestnuts sautéed with wild mushrooms, pureed with bits of butter and a splash of cream.’ The boar story has enboldened me, though not enough to look directly at Ninuccia, who is already glaring at me. ‘We could mount a little more cream, perfume it with dry Marsala, a spoonful into each bowl. Let the cream melt into the hot velvety stuff. Ninuccia, please, just listen, just try to taste it in your mind before you … all the elements are at hand save, maybe, the Marsala … I mean, it is the right moment for …’
Ninuccia’s open disdain causes the others to exaggerate their desire for this anything-but-simple soup and Miranda, tilting back again on the hind legs of her chair, is softly laughing.
•
Between the Thursday of her announced withdrawal from the burners and the very next Thursday’s farewell feast with the intoxicated boar, the sting of Miranda’s news had yet to be soothed. As we sat down together, it was a muted gaiety the tribe mustered: feeble chatter around a table of funeral meats for the sake of the widow. Neither did the cold winey cream meeting the hot faint smokiness of the soup bring forth half a sigh nor the gold char of the boar’s crust nor the exquisite drunkenness of its flesh. As though awaiting a dreaded train onto which only one of us would board – the great black thing having just hurtled into its berth – we linger, saying little. I could be the dancing bear who distracts them from their bile but I will not. Grown weary of what seems their selfishness, I just want the evening to end. We’d not yet cleared the table when the candles had spent themselves and it was by the last of the firelight that we rose – scorning Miranda’s plea to leave it all to her – and began carrying things behind the bedsheet curtain, excusing ourselves like strangers if we brushed by one another, reached at the same time for the same dish. So much for pulling my chair a millimetre closer to the Thursday table.
‘I need to be alone for a while. Some things I want to do without any of you underfoot. Be off, be gone.’
The tribe bid one another buonanotte as though it was addio.
All the way back into town I repeat and repeat what Andrè Gide taught me so long ago: If you want to discover new lands, you must consent to stay a very long time at sea.
•
It is late November – five weeks since the Thursday night of the boar – and Miranda and I are sitting midst the market-day fracas at Bar Duomo with our high-noon white wine.
‘They’ve been calling and stopping by and generally tormenting me, Chou,’ she says.
‘I know. They’ve been calling me as well. I’d not expected that. More I’d assumed they would begin arranging things among themselves, hoping I’d set off for Mars or wherever they think I came from. On that last Thursday, I’d felt it was me, the prospect of my becoming more present, that had caused them to be so sullen, so …’
‘How much you have yet to learn about Umbrians. Had they been anything but sullen, it would have been an afront to me, a form of disrespect. You saw and felt them to be unsympathetic. Cold. Both of which may or may not have been the case. They were being themselves. They were being Umbrian.’
‘Touché.’
‘You cannot be Umbrian. Nor must you try. We are all eternally ourselves.’
‘Ditto. Touché.’
‘Who’s been telephoning you?’
‘It’s mostly Gilda who calls to say that when she passes by the rustico there’s no evidence of progress. Paolina calls, too, but just for a greeting. I’ve begun suggesting to both Gilda and Paolina that we meet at our place until the work is finished in the rustico but they baulk, say no one wants to drive up into town, look for a parking place, share the corso with tourists bemoaning the dearth of “lasagna” on every menu in centro storico.’
Miranda laughs her goddess laugh and sips her wine. ‘It’s true. Country people tend toward listlessness after the day’s work and want nothing of town life to interrupt the tranquility of an evening. Most of us make the trek up onto the rock only on market days and then only if we have something to sell. They must be patient, our friends. Either patient or inclined to open their own homes for a Thursday night. Every one of them lives within decent striking distance to the others, wouldn’t you say? It would be only you who would have to drive a few extra kilometres. I should have thought to raise that possibility when we were all together.’
She cracks a slender grissino and dips the piece into her wine, lets it fall delicately into her mouth, chews thoughtfully, shifting her gaze to two men who sit at a table to our right. In their market-day corduroy suits, freshly ironed shirts buttoned to their throats, black wool coppolas pulled to their brows, they are farmers whose wives are in the Piazza del Popolo bartering and selling the stuffs they’ve grown, harvested this morning before dawn and ported up into Orvieto. At last they can sit together to drink and smoke in santa pace, sainted peace. One of them holds a Toscanello between his lips, puts a match to its tip and, like a fish, makes short, quick puffs to set the grappa-soaked leaves aflame. He puffs, inhales, puffs some more until, at last, its smoke cuts the wine-laden air of the bar. Miranda closes her eyes.
‘All the men I’ve ever loved have smoked Toscanelli: my grandfather, my father, who knows how many uncles and cousins, the first boy who kissed me, my husband …’
Without deciding to, I interrupt her. I say, ‘Barlozzo smoked them. Vanilla-scented.’
She’s quiet for a long time, the Toscanello smoke having set her dreaming until, the spell broken, she looks at me, says, ‘As far as I can recall, this is the first you’ve spoken of your old duke since …’
‘Is it? Is it? I never intended to … I guess it’s only that …’
‘It’s only that you were in love with him and that makes it difficult, makes it …’
She cuts short her thought, sips her wine, waits for me to speak. After a while I say, ‘I wish you had known Floriana.’
‘An artful foil. Deflect me with talk of his lover, will you?’
Let me be, I beg her silently, knowing she won’t. At best, she will only shift recourse. If I won’t talk, Miranda will. ‘I find myself thinking about him,’ she says, ‘reminded of things he’d say, how he’d lope rather than walk in that right-sided tilt of his, as though Aeolus walked on his left and he wanted nothing to do with the wind. Will you deny it?’
‘Deny that I loved Barlozzo? Why would I?’
‘That you were in love with him.’
‘Miranda, please …’
‘You’ve not been the same since, when was it? Nearly a year ago by now?’
‘In December. It will be a year in late December.’
‘Even widows shed their weeds after a year. Umbrian women, if not Sicilian. You two had – what shall I call it? – a kind of delerium of comradeship. Your affinity was complete and often exclusory. Even Fernando was superfluous, any fool could see that. As far as I know, Barlozzo was an anchorite before you came along and …’
‘You’re mistaken. Fernando excluded himself when his concentration wandered elsewhere, knowing he could re-enter our society at will. And as for the anchorite in Barlozzo, it’s true that he lived a long time as a recluse but his renaissance began when he and Flori began to spend time together. He loved her, Miranda, how he loved her, had always loved her since they were children.’
I told her that we, Fernando and I, were background music, a fresh audience for his stories, the tales of his beloved patrimony. Consenting to his raging and blustering, his gestures of imperiousness, we knew he was fragile as a beaten child. To me, he was a tall, skinny boy with a small boy’s persistent hunger for caress. He could live on filched eggs, mostly raw, and great quantities of dubious red and if his pantry was bare save half a bushel of chestnuts, he’d invite us to dine, roasting the things, splashing them with wine so they’d go soft like pudding inside their shells. We’d salt the first batch and sugar the second. A two-course feast. ‘Non omnis moriar – I will die but not wholly.’ He quoted Horace like prayers.
Sotto voce, Miranda says her own Horatian prayer: ‘Be wise and strain the wine for life is brief. Prune back hope. Even while we speak, envious time has passed; mistrust tomorrow and seize the day.’
She takes my chin in her hand, looks at me hard and long. ‘Better to admit that you were in love with him.’
During these past months I have been writing about our years in San Casciano. About Barlozzo. I think to an early passage in the text:
A man they call Barlozzo appears to be the village chieftan, walking as he does up and down the tables, setting down plates, pouring wine, patting shoulders. Somewhere beyond seventy, Barlozzo is long and lean, his eyes so black they flicker up shards of silver. Gritty, he seems. Mesmeric. I will come to know those eyes, the way they soften to grey in the doom just before a storm, be it an act of God or some more personal tempest. His thick smooth hair is white and blond and announces that he is at once very young and very old. And for as long as I will know him, I will never be certain if time is pulling him backward or beckoning him ahead. A chronicler, a raconteur, a ghost. A mago is Barlozzo. He will become my muse, this old man, my animatore, the soul of things for me.
Miranda breaks another breadstick in two, wets half in her wine. Holding it near her mouth, she says, ‘Whether or not you were in love with him, let him go. It’s time to let him go.’
A parting gift, she hands me the wine-soaked piece of bread-stick, sips the heel of her wine, kisses the top of my bent head. ‘I’ll see you later, little one.’
Worse than a Cassandra, my darling Miranda. How does she see, how can she know. Let him go? Not now. Not yet. I notice the breadstick still in my hand and so eat the limp, wet thing without tasting it. I ask for another glass of wine, move to a table closer to the farmers, all the better to take in the smoke of their Toscanelli. I let myself remember him saying:
I stood up and began buttoning my jacket as he was looking down at some piece of paper, running his finger along a line of numbers and droning about statistics and therapies for multiple metastasis. In a voice louder than I’d meant to use I asked the doctor to tell me, plain and simple, how much time I would have if I just let things be. At first he seemed not to understand. He raised his head, sat back in his chair, stared at me as though wondering who I was. As though he was seeing me for the first time. Not a morbid festering mass of blood and bones but a man. Still a man. He waited a long time before he answered. ‘A year. More or less. I’d estimate a year, Signor Barlozzo.’
The old duke had arranged two kitchen chairs under the stand of oaks behind his ruin of a house, his facing into the hot light of a straight-up sun, mine looking at him. Looking at him, I hear him, too, the soft baritone broken by a sigh now and then or a drag on his cigarette. At some point a while ago I’d stopped hearing the words, though. Stopped consenting to them. Silver swam in his great dark eyes and the long taut length of him was slouched, slanted in the chair, his spider legs crossed at the knee. He crushed the stub of a Camel against the green tin of an ashtray decorated with the Martini vermouth label. ‘I’ve never liked vermouth. Just ruins the good clean taste of gin,’ he would always say. He lit another cigarette.
No noxious drenches, no carving away at my innards, no withering burns. Nothing. It’s not that I shall lie still and make it easy for the old Horseman. I shall fight him to the death, you see, duel with him, give him a fine game and, when I must, I shall surrender to him. But meanwhile I would like nothing better than to live this year in company with you and Fernando. Not in grief, mind you, not in mourning, not with you stepping lightly, pacifying desires and avoiding words and deeds which you deem unseemly. It is not a year in which I shall practise to die but one in which I shall live the rest of my life. Complete with all the sentiments and emotions and frailties and impulses which I suppose are the sum of it. I shall not take on new guises in the hopes of passing on more nobly. What and who I love, and what and who I don’t, have been fixed for a while now. And so the categories shall remain. I have no wish to walk along The Great Wall nor to see the sun rise over a pyramid. Above that meadow out there, day breaks red and yellow like the cleaved heart of a peach and, when the ewes have lambed, the spectacle is accompanied by their squealing and baa-ing and it’s then that I wish the whole world could be sitting here with me on this hill. I want a year of ordinary days, Chou. October days, November days. Rain in great fat splashes beating tunnels into the earth when it’s dry, thunder so fierce it stops your heart, I want to hold the new leaves on the vines in the palm of my hand. I don’t want different than what I have now. I don’t even want more. I’ve always thought the gods have been just with me. Always liked my portion of things. I shall receive this last one with open arms.
No, I won’t let you go. How I miss you. And, yes, how I love you.
•
Later that same day, Miranda and I meet at the rustico. The once cracked and sagging floor tiles have been torn up to reveal a foundation of packed earth and stones, which Miranda’s nephews have covered, in part, with paint-dripped tarps and plastic sheeting and decorated, strategically, with buckets to catch the almost daily autumn rains that seep through the newly completed roof repairs. The cosy wreckage that was the rustico seems a desolate, ravaged place as we high-step through the tiny precinct, intent on conserving a windfall of pears from Ninuccia’s trees.
‘We’ll put everything right, you’ll see,’ Miranda chirps at me over her shoulder as I go about lighting fires in the hearth and the iron stove.
Having stripe-peeled and poached four bushels of brown-skinned Boscs and bathed them in spiced red, Miranda and I are wiping down one-litre jars of the rubied fruit, stacking them on the shelves along with the fifty or so jars of other fruits and vegetables already saved for winter and spring Thursday suppers. Smoothing her pinafore, patting the pearly sweat from her forehead, she moves from the pantry back into the kitchen, and takes up a cleaver. She says, ‘Let’s get to the violenza.’
In a basket on the work table there are perhaps a dozen heads of garlic, the purple colour of the cloves bright beneath papery skins. Slapping head after head with the flat of the cleaver, she scrapes the smashed, unpeeled cloves into a five-litre jug of new oil in which she’d earlier stuffed leaves of wild sage, wild fennel flowers, rosemary, a fistful of crushed, very hot chillies. She is building one of her famous potions. Violence, she calls it. She uses it to gloss vegetables before tumbling them into the roasting pan, to massage loins of pork and the breasts and thighs of her own fat chickens, to drizzle over burning hot charcoaled beef and veal.
‘It’s good for everything but lamb and wild birds and the aches and pains of most men; though, more than once, I’ve rubbed it into a cut or a scrape, disinfecting the wound better than straight alcohol could and leaving a much more pleasing perfume on the skin.’
‘The aches and pains of most men? The ones they inflict or the ones they suffer?’
‘I guess I was thinking more about the ones they inflict.’
‘Is that why you’ve never married again?’
Anticipating that Miranda would resume her talk of Barlozzo, I am prepared. I play offence. Her eyes cast downward, she tears the leaves off a branch of sage, pushes them through the neck of the bottle. I try again.
‘Is it? Is that why you’ve never married again?’
‘Could be.’
‘Have you even considered it?’
‘Are you about to punish me for my ranting at you about Barlozzo? Is that …’
‘Punish? Hardly.’
‘Good, because … because I feel it’s my right, age has rights, in our case, a kind of mother’s right …’
‘Mostly, I saw Barlozzo as my child. Sometimes you see me as your child … we’re all trying to save someone when the most – no, the best – we can do might be to cook a good supper for each other and let life shape itself. I think that you were talking to yourself when you told me to “let him go”. I think there’s someone you’ve yet to let go. And like a mother, yes, like a mother, you don’t want what’s happened to you to happen to me. But I don’t need saving, Miranda, really I don’t.’
‘Less do I. I’m Umbrian, you’ll recall. Umbrian women are as choice of pain as we are of pleasure. Who would Job be without his burden? In any case, I shall answer your question. The truth is that I have considered marrying again. The greater truth is that I never would. It’s either too late or not late enough, I can’t decide which.’
‘But if some day you were to feel it was neither too late nor too soon, which one would you choose? Of all the men you know, if you could choose, which one would it be?’
‘None of them.’
‘Not even Filiberto?’
‘Not even him. I’m still working on the ending of my first marriage.’
‘A very long ending.’
Miranda has never spoken more than in passing about her husband. I know that he died young, suddenly. A very long time ago. She sits down, absently wiping down the sides of the oil bottle with a corner of her apron, corking it. She wraps her arms around the great jug, leans her kitchen towel turbaned head against it. As though against a tree. Or the chest of a lover. She looks at me.
‘He was a great beast of a man, my husband, kind as a baby deer, worked and laughed and slept and ate and drank passionately. His cousin was my neighbour in Castelpietro and when she married, Nilo came from Grosseto to the wedding. A Tuscan, Nilo Bracciolini was. We were married three months later. Or was it two? The foreman in a brick-making factory in Grosseto, that was Nilo’s job and, being such a good one, he wouldn’t hear of leaving it to come live in Castelpietro. Nor would I hear of leaving my parents, my sister and her children, my own work, my village. I couldn’t imagine crossing that border from Umbria into Toscana, save to visit. But we’d talked of all that before we married. Ci arrangeremo, we’d said; we’ll arrange things. He’d go off on Monday morning with four days’ worth of suppers packed in the boot of his Fiat 600; pots and bowls, a two-kilo loaf. A demijohn when he needed it. Empty pots and bundles of laundry in tow, Nilo would come home early on Friday and I’d be waiting for him. He’d bathe and we’d rest together and then he’d take me to supper at la Palomba. Every Friday. I’d go with him to Grosseto once a month, sometimes twice; I’d scour his apartment from floor to ceiling, stock his pantry, do what needed doing. I’d always fill the place with flowers and Nilo liked that. I could never stay more than a night or two because of my own job and so he’d put me on a bus back to Orvieto and from there I’d get myself to Castelpietro. To wait for Friday. For years and years that was our life. A good one. A good life. Nilo held me up like a china doll. Sometimes I still believe that’s what he did.’
I’m lost. I stay quiet, waiting for her to show me the way.
‘Nilo’s dying was made of two swords falling. How was it that a man could go off one Monday morning, big and sweet and crushing my lips with his coffee-wet moustache, telling me he loved me just as he always told me, how could it be that he never came back? That he could be counting stacks of bricks, sending them down a line to be wrapped, readied for shipping, all the while talking to the man working next to him and, in the time it took for that man to turn around and talk to the person next to him on the line, then turn back to Nilo, Nilo was already dead. Slumped in a heap on the spot where he’d been standing and laughing two minutes before. That was sword number one.
‘The second sword came after the mass, the funeral mass. The coffin had been carried out to the hearse and I should have followed it but, instead, I’d wanted to stay a while alone. Giorgia wouldn’t leave me, though, my sister, Giorgia. Shadowing me, insisting I was too weak to kneel another time. So I just stood there, my back to the altar, facing the main aisle, remembering how I’d minced along its length on my father’s arm and in my mother’s ivory satin, never minding how the dress strangled me about my bosoms or that it barely reached my ankles rather than sweeping the floor as it was meant to. When I arrived beside him, the first thing Nilo whispered was, “Amore mio, sei in attesa di un diluvio? Were you expecting a flood, my love?” That always made me laugh, him saying that, and so I stood there playing the scene over and over, willing it to paint over the fresh red hole where my life once was.
‘And then I noticed a child. A small, thin boy striding toward me from the main door of the church. He was pallid, weeping, maybe ten years old, maybe less. Even from a distance his eyes shackled mine. I waited for him. When we were toe to toe, I thought I must be dreaming, for it was Nilo. There before me was my husband as a boy. Skin so white I could see his veins, deep black pools, the eyes. Even his mouth, the point of his chin, it was Nilo. I stayed silent and the boy, save trying to stave his weeping, he was quiet, too. And then I felt it, like something falling away. From my eyes, from my throat, my body, some kind of veneer shattering. Glass, ice. Something that had been gently suffocating me for so long that I’d learned to breathe through it. All of it gone. I knew it before he told me. Sober as Abraham, that little boy, I knew it was true before he could say it: Sono figlio di Nilo. I am Nilo’s son.
‘I think the boy neither expected me to speak nor wished me to, it being enough for him to say the words aloud. Out of the dark, revealed. By then it was I who was keeping Giorgia upright, bending to soothe her, telling her I was fine, and when I looked back at the boy, there stood behind him a girl. Another one, I thought. Two children. Jesus help me. The girl stepped closer. “Io sono l’altra. I’m the other one,” she said. “Of course you are,” I whispered. White-skinned, red-haired, just like the boy. But not like the boy. Not like Nilo. In the yellow light of the church she might have been a statue, sculpted, serene. “Io sono l’altra,” she said again. “L’altra, the other one,” she repeated and, though I tried to make her eyes slide off mine, she held them there until she was sure I’d understood. The other woman. The second sword. I never said a word.
‘There was nothing to do but take her by the hand, the boy with my other hand, walk down the aisle and out the door, down the steps where all the mourners were lined up on either side, waiting to console the widow. We were both widows, I kept thinking that. We just kept walking. I could hear Giorgia muttering behind me. Someone folded us into the long black funeral car, smelling of lilies. Even now, lilies bring me to a faint, a frenzy. I don’t recall much after that. The boy’s weeping, I remember that. And that we never did let go of one another’s hands all morning long. The girl, she never cried or spoke; taut as a palace guard, she stayed. They let go first, mother and son, they let go of my hands when it was over. Half a nod, they turned, began walking away. I called after them, they who’d become my comfort, if you can believe that. In the arc of an hour, they’d gone from being the embodiment of my mortification to becoming, somehow, just mine. How strange. How …’
‘Not strange. Not for you. Not strange at all.’
‘Perhaps not. We tried to be a kind of family but that failed. Instead we slipped into twice- or thrice-yearly visits made more of duty than pleasure. I tried then to forge a friendship with them. I had more than they did, more than I needed. As soon as it was comfortable for the tenants to vacate it, I signed over the deed to Nilo’s family property up here in Umbria. It was the place where we’d planned to retire some day. A fine stretch of land, a small house, in Civitella del Lago. They moved there, mother and son, and she worked in the village. I think it might have been two, maybe three years later when she sold everything. They went back to Grosseto. Nilo’s son is married, I think it was four or five years ago. The friendship didn’t work, either. After all this time, I’m still not certain if it was more her pain or mine that kept us from it. I expect one day that he’ll come to see me, Nilo’s son. That he’ll bring his children. Another grandmother, I would like to be that for them. I wait for it but I would never ask for it. I do think that Nilo must have spoken well and often to his son of me, maybe not as his wife but as a good person. A good woman, something of the sort. Wishful thinking? Is my notion made of only that?
‘Nilo’s betrayal did not leave me in despair. I never sat and rocked, imagining him kissing her or tangling his legs around hers in the candlelight, his feeling her belly when the baby quickened, I never did. All of that belonged to him and to her. It wasn’t the betrayal but Nilo’s treachery in not owning up to it. The dupe. That’s what left me stammering, inarticulate. It left me defenceless. And profiting from my teetering state, fear took over. Set up to stay. I was and remain victorious over despair, but fear is still with me. I cover it up with my prancing and joking, with my cooking. Once again, to answer your question, I would choose none of them.’
‘But you and Filiberto …’
‘Filiberto and I. An unlived love. Which is not the same as love denied or undeclared. It’s a love with distance between the lovers. A mostly private, mostly silent love, which – by its nature – avoids every kind of injury. Not even love can staunch a wound, Chou. Or if it can, while it’s doing its work on the old wound, the new love is equally busy wounding one in another place. If not in the same place.’
Miranda smiles, looks up at me as if for sympathy, for accord but, so lost am I in my own story of wounds, both vintage and of recent harvest, I say nothing. She squints her eyes then, as though the old light by which she tries to look at the past has grown dim. When she looks at me again, she returns to the discourse about her shepherd lover.
‘So, yes, Filiberto and I … there is this distance between us. As though there was a stand of ancient elms we must traverse in order to get to one another. And so we wander through the trees and that’s enough for us and has been for twenty years. It’s enough that I feel wiser and lovelier when he’s near, which doesn’t mean I can’t manage when he’s not. It’s Filiberto I run to on the morning when I see the olives have budded. I need to tell him about beautiful things. Him, exactly him. One must put a face to love. One must know who to run to.’
‘Quaint. Charming enough. Perhaps even ideal. But …’
‘Not real?’ Miranda smiles.
‘It would be like living on sweets. I would miss the salt. Half a love.’
‘The good half,’ she tells me.
‘You said it: I’m still working on the ending of my first marriage. Not a stand of fine old elms, it’s Nilo who is the distance between you and Filiberto.’
‘And what if he is?’
‘Then he is. I just think it’s good that you know it’s Nilo and not the trees.’
‘Doesn’t change anything, does it? What name I give it?’
‘No. No, it doesn’t change. But don’t you wonder if …’
‘I thought we were telling truths here. Hard ones. Or are we only telling mine?’
I stay quiet.
‘Fine. Then I’ll tell one of yours. The old duke was your unlived love.’
‘Not a truth of mine. A detour from yours.’
For all this time that we’ve been talking, I’ve been settled on the edge of the work table while Miranda has been sitting on a stool in front of it, every now and then wiping down the great jug of violenza with a damp cloth, polishing it with a corner of her apron, wiping it down again. She rises now, lifts the jug, walks to the armoire with it, sets it on an empty shelf. As though she spots an errant smudge, she rubs the jug again with her apron, slams her palm down on the already tight cork. She closes the armoire doors and, still facing them, she says, ‘What are you reaching for, Chou? I think it’s guilt you want to know about, isn’t it? You want to know if I once thought or still think that I failed Nilo somehow and thus sent him racing off for succour somewhere else … Do I wonder if he’d have gone to her if I hadn’t chosen to stay in Castelpietro? Would he have wanted her if I’d been better or kinder or more beautiful? If I’d been a more faithful panderer?’
‘Panderer?’
‘Si, ruffiana. Panderer. Men need a daily dose of fawning. As we would coax a contrary child with bread and sugar so must men be coaxed. We must enoble them. The most gentle critique is censure to a man. He retreats. Even when he fights back, he is retreating, saving up small, sharp pieces of his displeasure, a bag of sticks and stones for whenever he might feel strong enough to fight. Maybe I allowed Nilo’s bag to get too full and, rather than heaving stones at me, he left. Essentially, he did leave me. With neither the will nor the talent to pander, I made the fatal error of being sincere. I was indeed guilty. Guilty even though I knew that fable, what’s it called? The one in which the courtiers compliment the king on his new suit while he prances naked before them. Those people knew he needed the compliment more than he needed the truth. What’s that story called?’
‘“The Emperor’s New Clothes” in English. I don’t know the title in Italian. Virginia Woolf said it better, though. Do you know of Virginia Woolf?’
‘Do I know of la lupacchiotta? That’s what Signora Giacomini called Virginia. The she-wolf.’
‘Who is Signora Giacomini?’
‘Was. The matriarch of the clan Giacomini – four generations of them all living in the same palazzo. It’s where I was cook and housekeeper until I married Nilo. La signora loved English novels – in translation, of course – and she being nearly blind when I was there, it fell to me to read aloud to her after lunch. The she-wolf was her favourite and she knew by heart every line of two or three of her books so that when I’d try to skip a page or even a phrase, she’d reach out to pinch my arm, keen and mumble until I’d go back to where I’d left off. It was her lullabye, my reading, the only way she could have her afternoon sleep. Yes, I know about Virginia.’
‘Sotto voce,’ I quote ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size.’
‘Non capisco. What did the she-wolf say?’
‘From A Room of One’s Own: Women have served all these …’
‘Never mind. The last thing I need right now is a dose of pontification from la lupacchiotta. She’s a big stick that women use to beat men over the head with, and I say there’s nothing wrong with men that isn’t likewise wrong with us.’
I know her dethroning of Woolf is burlesque but still it irks me and I let her know by refusing to parry. Miranda rises, comes to me, takes my face in her hands, shakes it back and forth as she might to a loved child. In a tired, gravelly whisper, she says, ‘We were talking about Nilo Bracciolini and Miranda Filippeschi and I could give a damn at this moment about Virginia Woolf.’
‘Fair enough,’ I concede and she returns to her chair.
‘It wasn’t our living apart four days a week. ‘I’ve never believed it was that which provoked Nilo’s betrayal. Out of sight, out of mind signifies something less than love. Our story was likely finished long before he ever held the other one in his arms. Our story ended when we struck a truce, when we stopped trying to finesse one another, when we quit the game of convincing and beguiling. Beware of tolerance between lovers. We are obliging only of those we don’t love. The more obliging we are, the less we love the one obliged. Love and tolerance are antagonists. No, they are mortal enemies. Nilo and I, at some point in time, we became tolerant of one another. Believing we’d earned it, I saw nothing of peril in the long, unbroken peace we lived and I called it happiness. I named it happiness, the good-natured dance we did, adagio, adagio, around the carcass of a long-dead love.’
She stands upright, unties her kitchen-towel turban, rewraps it around her braids, pats it into place, goes then to fetch two baskets from where they hang by the back door, slips them over one arm. She tells me she’s going to see what vegetables the others have left in the shed. Weary of groping in that darkish past, I think it’s the present Miranda’s gone to retrieve as much as the vegetables. No sooner out the door, she comes back in.
‘In case you’re also wondering if I miss him, I will tell you that I don’t. I don’t miss Nilo, not he, himself.’ She heads out the door, turns back once again. ‘Ah, but how I long for the man I thought he was.’
For the man I thought he was. I don’t know how much time passes before I hear her shouting, half laughing, from the shed. ‘Come and help me with the wine, will you, Chou?’
Some of the mischief back in her gaze, she nods to a demijohn and we begin rolling it the few metres between the shed and the back door into the kitchen.
‘And as for la lupacchiotta, the she-wolf, everything I’ve read of hers sounds as though her nostrils quiver when she speaks. Puzzo sotto il naso – a stink under the nose.’
Seeking relief in sarcasm, Miranda is pleased with her lampoon and begins to launch another one, but I’m already telling her about the time I tried to speak of Proust to Barlozzo.
‘All I did was to ask him if he’d ever read Proust,’ I tell Miranda as we position the barrel near the supper table, both of us already laughing.
‘And he said, “For pity’s sake, an epicene Frenchman rhapsodising over a cake damped in tea, no less. At the least he might have poured himself a thimbleful of vin santo. I can’t imagine what he might have written had there been a tin of cornmeal biscotti thick with pine nuts and white raisins near to hand … Better yet, spaghetti carbonara, the pancetta crisp, a whole hill of pecorino on top, a lovely glass of red … I could understand a man getting misty over the taste of that.”’
Miranda laughs with only half a heart, the rest of her lingering among the ancient elms with Nilo and the costumeless emperor. Perhaps she’s still in the church with l’altra. I feel desolate with wanting to bring Miranda back. I try another dose of folly. I tell her about little Biagio. My darling Biagio, an eighty-something farmer from western Tuscany who has long been my friend. Another in the anti-Proust league, he’d start ranting and snorting every time I’d paraphrase Proustian text about twilight: When the trees are black and the sky is still light …
‘Look, Biagio, it’s Proust light,’ I’d tell him.
‘Who the hell is Proust?’
‘You know very well who is Proust.’
‘And what did he know about light? My grandfather would call all of us out into the vineyard just before twilight. He’d already be there, the legs of his wooden chair stuck into the earth between the vines, his head thrown back, studying the sky. He said he could smell the twilight before it fell. I wonder if Proust ever smelled the twilight. Every damn farmer who’s ever ploughed a field at sunset could have told you more and told you better than a body who sat squinting at things from a window.’
‘End of that discussion,’ I say, knowing it’s the end of another one. We are quiet too long before we remember to laugh. But our laughter now has no music and so dies quickly, the foolish repartee impotent against the past where Miranda’s eyes still search. She adjusts her headdress, pinches her upper lip between thumb and forefinger, tilts her head to look at me.
‘Life’s a bungled hobble over thin ice, my love.’
‘Always thin, the ice?’
‘Mostly thin. Such a foolish sight we must be from some other vantage than our own as we leap, floe to floe, our gathered trifles – mostly worldly – weighing us down and causing much of the bungling.’
As though she can see herself now – a lifetime of leaping, gathering, bungling – Miranda’s laugh is raucous, contagious and then my own parade of storms and passions marches before me and, through the strange broken old place on the verges of the Montefiescone Road, my laughing echoes hers.
At last, gasping for air, Miranda says, ‘I say we should heed Orazio and prune back hopes for anything more than tonight’s supper. And you?’
She’s on her feet and out the door to the gravel drive before I can shout, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To light the lantern. Miranda’s back in business for the evening and my truckers need to know. And to hell with the buckets and the rodent holes and will you please go to see what creatures might be hanging in the cheese hut and bring them here so we can get to work? But first, go to Bazzica and use the phone, get Fernando here.’
‘We’d already agreed that he would be here at seven so …’
‘Wonderful. And Filiberto … He’ll see the lantern lit and come to find out why, but you must still go to Bazzica to telephone Ninuccia. Tell her to bring her supper here and to call the others. They’ll all know what to do. ‘Vai, vai, go, go,’ she says, first hugging me close then heaving me away as she begins to topple down the tables stacked up along the walls by the nephews. Flapping her great lovely form about the place, she stops only to press the hem of her apron to the weepy midnight blue of her eyes, pulls down another table and another one, lining them up, wiping them down with a kitchen towel dipped in a rainwater bucket and I think that Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of Buonrespiro, is a queen bee in connubial frenzy. She stops in mid flight, looks at me, ‘How I miss him, Chou. I miss Filiberto who is real and I am decidedly not longing for the man I thought was Nilo and I’m thinking that the ice is good and hard this evening and that I’m hungry in my belly and my soul and how dearly I wish Orazio was here. And Barlozzo. Tell Ninuccia to bring a pack of Toscanelli.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Per ora, for now.’