PART II

NINUCCIA

 

‘AFTER ALL, I’LL BE SEVENTY-SIX IN FEBRUARY, GOOD ENOUGH reason for me to stay out of the trees, wouldn’t you say?’

It’s a late afternoon in the first week of December and, having neither seen nor heard from her in a few days, I’ve telephoned Miranda, asked her if she would join us – the Thursday tribe – tomorrow morning while we work at harvesting olives on a farm belonging to Ninuccia’s cousins.

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you pick but just that you be there with us. We’ve missed you during these days of the raccolta … and besides, what has your being seventy-six to do with anything. You’ve been seventy-six for as long as I’ve known you.’

‘Have I? And for how long has that been?’

‘Six years.’

‘Do I understand that you are accusing me of approaching my eighty-second birthday?’

‘Based on what you, yourself, have told me of your anagraphic history, I am only suggesting that …’

‘You needn’t bother accusing or suggesting since it’s my life and I like being seventy-six and so I’ll just carry on being seventy-six until I feel like being seventy-five. Besides, no one has yet to take me even for sixty-six. Not to my face.’

‘All I was trying to tell you is that this is the first year we haven’t harvested together in one grove or another …’

‘Have you been working with Ninuccia?’

‘She’s been picking in the northern groves with family members while I’ve been working in the more southern territory with Gilda and a group of Moldavans from Porano. The harvest is just about finished and that’s why I wanted you to come tomorrow. The only trees left to strip are the ones on the farthest southern corner below where we’ve been working, not more than a day’s work if some of the others come to help us. Maybe Ninuccia.’

‘Good. I’ve been hoping that you two would spend some time together, get to know one another. Have you decided who’ll be your first Thursday partner?’

‘Not really. It’s not as though any one of them is waving her arms in longing to get into the kitchen with me. I’m not so certain this “cooperative effort” is going to be …’

‘Zitta. Hush. I, myself, I’d begin with Ninuccia.’

‘What makes you think she …’

‘I just do. She’s a lovely creature, Ninuccia.’

‘Lovely, yes, even though she’s the self-appointed president of the International Society for the Supression of Savage Customs.’

‘Did you just make that up?’

‘No. Thomas Hardy, I think it was.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Well, the title would suit our Ninuccia. Her traditionalism is religious, result, in part, I think, of her long sojourn in the south. Pierangelo is Calabrian, you know, and when they first were married she lived with him down there in some mountain village on the edge of the world. Ninuccia and her stories.’

‘More a despot than a storyteller …’

‘A punto. Exactly. I’ve always known her family. I remember her as a girl. Hardworking as a mule, a big lumbering gawky sort of girl. Loveable. Her parents delighted in her, despaired for her. No one came to court Ninuccia until Pierangelo. The just-wed girl who set off for Calabria with her love returned a few years later still in Ninuccia’s form, the same only in her form, her spirit having been transformed. Dour, withdrawn, save when she was pontificating. From then until now, when she does speak of her life in the south, it’s always of the isolation, the beauty of the place. Almost never about people save her mother-in-law whom, it would seem, she adored. How ever it was that they lived up there in those mountains, whatever it was that happened there, it was what shaped Ninuccia.’

‘And what shaped her belongs to her. Why would you need to know more?’

‘Not a need. Her severe facade, such a heavy shield. I think she might long to lay it down once in a while. You know she’s fond of you.’

‘No. I don’t know that and less do I seek her fondness … Why must you invent these …’

‘Talk to her, Chou.’

‘Talk to her about what? I have a hard time getting beyond buonasera with her. All we have in common are you and Thursdays. I …’

‘Why is it that of all the men and women who have been my friends and confidantes and enemies and lovers for these past seventy-some years, why do you suppose it was to you, only you, to whom I’ve talked to more honestly than I could even to myself? Even to my agonising self, alone in the dark, wishing away thousands of nights?’

I am an uneasy repository for the private truths of others, my own being unwieldly as they are. And yet, more here in Italy than in the other places where I’ve lived, I have often become the safe one. I am outside the clan and thus outside the clan’s judgement. The eternal stranger, a fresh white page. Talking to me is talking to the wind, to the wall. No matter how long I stay, I will always be just passing through. I think that’s it. Why else it may or may not be that I am often appointed custodian of another’s emotional archives is too elusive for my grasp. Antonia, Tosca, Floriana, Barlozzo. Fernando says it’s because when someone speaks, I am rapt. No interjections, no comparisons to events or sentiments of my own. As though I am empty, ready and waiting to be filled up with what they long to tell. And everyone longs to tell. Miranda has been talking while I have been wandering in my thoughts and, returning to her, I hear, ‘And while you’re at it, suggest a Thursday night to celebrate the new oil.’

‘While I’m at what?’

‘Talking to Ninuccia. The new oil. The new wine. Pasta cooked in wine, sauced with oil and cracked pepper and a few gratings of pecorino and then we could …’

‘So much for permitting me to compose menus. Has there been such great progress on the work in the rustico over the past few weeks or are you ready for another supper among the buckets …’

‘I was thinking we might use the old mill in Castelpietro where the olives are pressed. The floor is packed earth and the walls are bare stone but there are tables and chairs, a good-enough five-burner gas range bought from a restaurant in Montefiascone years ago. Plenty of pots and pans and the hearth is wonderful: big enough to roast an elk. We would pay Settimio for the wood we burned and … Do you know him, Settimio?’

‘The mill caretaker. I don’t really know him but …’

‘He’d be thrilled enough to let us use the place. More would he be to sit down to supper with us.’

‘Would you speak to him then?’

‘Yes, yes. I’ll stop by the mill. It’ll be grand, Chou. Why didn’t I think of this before?’

•

A day later on a morning smelling of snow, there are four of us hitched up in the glittery ruckus of the leaves of ancient trees dripping with purply black fruit. Ninuccia, Gilda, Paolina and I are harvesting together, picking the olives by hand. Picking them one by one. Wrapped in kerchiefs and shawls, a layer of woollies, one of skirt, one of apron poufed out from under two of sweater, we are a sturdy breed of sylph. Shouting to one another across the winds, our collective mood is jubilant on this last morning of the raccolta with only twenty or so of the eight hundred-tree grove left to pick. I think how I’ll miss sitting up here in the high perch of one tree or another. I look at my old hands, the half-numbed fingers sticking out from cut-off gloves, plucking at the fruit, stripping the limbs and branches, guiding the olives into the basket strapped around my waist. As we finish a tree, climb down the homemade wooden ladders to dump our baskets into the sacks waiting below, we spar over which of the remaining trees ‘belongs’ to whom.

Each year I wonder if it will be the last one when we pick by hand in this ancient way, since almost every farmer – save those who tend a grove only for the family table – now uses machines that shake the trees until the fruit falls into nets spread on the ground below them, a violent method which bruises the fruit and risks the purity of the oil. The word that’s been buzzing about during our work these past days is that Ninuccia’s cousins are selling this grove to a consortium. If that’s so, the fruit from future harvests of these eight hundred trees will be tossed together with that from groves all over the region and from other regions as well, the mass shipped to a central location to be pressed in a stainless-steel factory and then passed off as prestigious extra-virgin oil. Traditional life is vanishing.

At least this harvest – these olives – are being poured into endless fifty-kilo sacks and loaded onto the beds of old trucks and carted to a stone barn situated just outside the village of Castelpietro. Stacked up by the mill door, the sacks will be carried inside by local boys who, all in good time, hurl the fruit into the crusher to be pummelled and split between great slabs of travertine by the force of a velvet-eyed she-ass harnessed by a rope: a ritual perhaps 4000 years old in these Umbrian hills. Elders of the family will stand guard over the process, all the while crooning to and praising the fat little beast as she plods her circuit. They stop her course often, petting her while she rests and eats and drinks. Miranda is right. The raccolta deserves to be celebrated.

With her usual ease Miranda had arranged for our use of the mill for a Thursday night. Next Thursday night to be exact. Three days hence. She had also spoken with Ninuccia. This morning, while I was layering on my clothes and preparing to get to work, Ninuccia came to me, started in naming dishes her family had always cooked for the harvest, rattled off what there was waiting to be picked from her garden, what herbs and vegetables were already strung and set to dry in her attic.

‘Of course it’s yours to decide … the menu, I mean. But listen, when we’ve finished with the harvesting this morning let’s go to the mill and talk a bit. I’ll tell Gilda and Paolina to come, too, and we can make a lunch of wine and bread and oil. Also, I left a pot of beans there on my way here this morning, nourishment for my cousins, the old ones who stay at the mill all day long.’

‘I’ll telephone Miranda.’

‘If I know her, she’ll be there before us. But surely, call her. Va bene?’

‘Va benissimo.’

•

It is nearly one o’clock when we four climb down from the last trees and – chilled and starving and triumphant – make our way up onto the bed of an old blue truck to collapse among the sacks of olives. Laughing and shouting and wishing we had wine to warm us, we are a quartet of Cleopatras being carted ceremonially through the grove to the mill by a handsome young charioteer called Gianmario.

One of the cousins is toasting bread in the hearth, smearing it with the new oil, thick as honey and green as jade. Jugs of wine and a collection of tumblers are set out on a long wooden table where Ninuccia’s beans wait in a deep, black-speckled terracotta pot. Half-dried figs threaded on butcher’s twine hang from iron hooks on the stone wall behind the table and Gilda takes down a string, pulls the still plump fruit free and begins slicing it thickly, pressing the pieces onto the hot oiled bread and offering the trenchers to the old cousins, to us. To the she-ass. It is the first time I’d ever eaten figs on bread. How delicious but how strange I thought until I thought again, of Fig Newtons and then of raisin bread and then of my favourite biscuits, the ones stuffed with dried apricots. Dried fruit and something bread-like or cake-like to embrace it. Breaking through my Fig Newton reverie, one of the cousins announces, ‘E arrivata la Miranda.’

Miranda has arrived. Am I mistaken or did he take off his cap, smooth his hair, place it back with a certain precision? Miranda-of-the-Bosoms – at seventy-six plus six – can still make the little boys cry. Sure enough the thrum of her ape – a three-wheeled, two-seat truck with a miniscule flatbed and tiny motor that sounds like a buzzing bee – sputters to silence and, in two beats, she shambles through the door, unwrapping her shawls, begins ladling out the beans and their good-smelling winey broth, refilling tumblers with the brawny teeth-staining red, asking after each of us, greeting the cousins and the she-ass. She takes a small piece of untoasted bread, holds it under the spout where the crushed, but not yet pressed, olives are sliding out in a dense, creamy paste. Letting a few drops of it fall onto the bread, she bites into it.

Glorioso, she says and the cousins pat one another on the back as though they, instead of the rain and the sun and the wind and the hundred-year-old lymph coursing through the trees, had made the olives good.

Sitting herself down at the table with us, she reaches for the bottle of oil, pours out a few drops onto the fleshy part of her palm just below the thumb and sucks at the oil, rolling her eyes in delight.

‘The only way to taste new oil,’ she says, laughing and smacking her lips. ‘There’s a pepper mill around here somewhere if anyone wants it for the figs. Am I to understand that this little convention is going about the work of resuming Thursday suppers?’

‘I think it will be,’ I tell her. ‘It was warmth and wine and food we were after first, though. I was just about to …’

Having helped herself to the beans, Miranda interrupts, ‘The oregano is good in the beans. Just enough. Brava,’ she says glancing at Ninuccia and nodding her head, her mouth turned down in a gesture of admiration. Shifting her gaze then to me, she asks, ‘So what will you cook, Chou?’

‘To begin, crostate di olivada’ – free-form rounds of cornmeal pastry folded and pleated over part of the olive pesto. A lattice work of pastry over the middle. We would use the new oil in the pastry and also in the olivada. ‘I think it’s good to use what’s left of last year’s olives – the ones we brined and dried. And, in the same dish, to use the new oil. You know, old and new. Round.’

‘Chou must always have a story with her bread,’ Miranda says. ‘Bene, d’accordo. Good, I agree. And then?’

‘I would cook pasta in novello – in the new wine.’

‘An ancient method.’ This is Gilda.

‘Right,’ I say, relieved not to have been countered. ‘It’s the only way dried pasta was cooked for centuries … boiling it in water is a relatively novel notion. From the middle of the ninteenth century, I think.’

Apart from Gilda, who is nodding her assent, the others swivel their heads in concert, looking to Miranda to dash this blasphemy. But she sits quietly, her silence a consent.

I wait a few beats before saying, ‘The method is almost the same as for risotto. A little new oil warmed in the pot with a minced onion, the raw pasta is then tossed about to coat it well, kept moving in the hot oil until it takes on a golden crust …’

‘Like the tostatura for rice?’ wonders Paolina, her shock softened by the comfort of something familiar.

‘Exactly. Then – also like for risotto – begin adding the wine in small doses, stirring the pasta until the wine is absorbed. Add more wine, let the pasta drink it in. Add more. Small doses. In about twelve minutes the pasta becomes rosy, perfectly al dente and all plumped with the wine. In this case the only sauce would be a bit more oil, some pepper and …’ Here I falter, not quite ready to tell them how I’ll finish the dish. I’m grateful when Miranda steps in.

‘E poi, and then? What will be next?’

‘Loins of caramelised pork braised in more novello with …’ I hesitate again before saying, ‘with prunes and cloves and cinnamon and …’

I look to Ninuccia, see her perplexity. This strange American; prunes with her pork? But it’s Paolina who saves me, she having sifted through childhood to find a memory.

‘I remember that my mother would make a braise of pork with dried prunes. And spices, too. Cinnamon. Surely she used cinnamon. But I don’t know if she cooked it in wine or broth. It must have been wine …’

Now it’s Ninuccia who recalls: ‘I remember a neighbour woman who came to help each December when we slaughtered a pig. She was from Lubriano, or maybe it was Bagnoregio, but anyhow she would make a kind of sausage with trimmings and prunes and spices, shape the paste into ovals and fry them dark and crisp. We’d stand by the stove, my cousins and I, wait for her to stuff one or two between thin slices of bread. We’d grab them and run away fast as we could, out of the house and up into the woods, clutching the hot little parcels tight to our chests as though someone would try to steal them. How good they were. I don’t know why we always ran up into the woods with them rather than just inhale them on the spot. I wonder. I hadn’t thought about that in forty years.’

I watch Miranda watching the others, listening to them, and I think she is content for this small exchange of memory and nostalgia. Miranda, too, must always have a story with her bread.

‘And then don’t you think we should have something with chestnuts?’ I ask. ‘Fried chestnut-flour cakes with raisins. And chestnuts cooked in spiced wine. The tastes of these are like a reprise of the pork … continuation. In fact, the little cakes and the drunken chestnuts could be served with the pork. It would all work together.’

‘Adesso, io ho fame. Now I’m hungry,’ says Ninuccia.

‘Anch’io. Me, too,’ says an old cousin who’d seated himself, prick-eared, at the end of the table with his tumbler and a pitcher of wine, intent on our homey discourse. Miranda shoos him away and, as he moves back toward his watch over the grinding stones, he turns around and says, ‘A Natale ci sposeremo. At Christmas, we’ll be married.’

‘Scemo, cretino.’ She calls him a fool, a cretin, her blush belying her pleasure.

Everyone putters about clearing the table and washing up, each one saying what she’ll bring along to the mill later that evening or in the morning to contribute to the supper. I’m about to leave, too, when Ninuccia says, ‘Wait a bit, won’t you? Faccio un caffé,’ she says, riffling through a cupboard drawer for the parts to a Bialetti.

I’m tired and want mostly to get home to Fernando and to a bath and a rest, to think about our own Thursday supper. But having found all the pieces to the little pot, she’s already packed it tightly with ground espresso, set it on the flame. I sit down again, take off my shawl and wonder – has she waited until now to tell me her impressions of the dishes I talked about? I am thinking that I do like this Ninuccia. And that maybe I do seek her friendship. Or is it Miranda’s powers of suggestion at work?

An elbow on the table, I rest my chin in the hollow of my hand and watch her fussing about the cups and searching for sugar. A great mass of bound Titian hair, her skin is pale and freckled, the congregation of spots, heavy on her cheeks and across her nose, makes a coppery mask under eyes grey and soft as pussywillow; she might be an Irishwoman as soon as an Umbrian one. She is sixty-six, so she said not long ago, though she looks to be far younger, her small breasts high and proud under her sweater, her hips wide, muscular, hers is a body shaped by a life of physical labours. Pouring out the coffee, she sings softly in a minor key, the words in a dialect I don’t understand. She sits down across from me.

‘Did you know that I lived in Calabria when Pierangelo and I were first married?’

I nod, yes, but I don’t speak.

‘Have you been there? Oh, I don’t mean to the beaches or …’

‘I’ve been in the mountains.’

‘Ah, well, then you know a bit how different it can be … there from here. Another country. Another world. It’s not as though I’d come from a wealthy home but, whatever we might have done without, our table was always full. Full enough. What I’m trying to say is that how I lived down there with Pierangelo and his mother and the others in that mountain village, well, that time left its mark. Not a scar, mind you, but an impact, still fresh. It shows in almost everything I do but, especially, it shows in how I cook. We Umbrians are mostly frugal, restrained – unlike the Emilians and the Lombards, for instance, or the Sicilians when they’ve the means to embroider. But it has become my nature to be … Spartan. I guess that’s the word. So I hope you’ll understand if I ask … don’t you think your menu is … well, let’s say that if the Sumptuary laws were still …’ She laughs rather than finishes her query. I am smiling, thinking how she is hardly the first person to accuse me of culinary lavishness. Ninuccia continues, ‘Una bontá, sicuramente, very good certainly but, Thursday suppers have always been, well, less themed, less formal, less complicated. Cosa c’e, c’e. You know, “What there is, there is”. That was my mother-in-law’s daily expression. Thrice daily. She could make supper out of sticks. I wonder if, in her whole life, she’d ever sat down to a supper like you’ve described.’

‘She, your mother-in-law, is she …’

‘She died a long time ago. When Pierangelo and I decided to move back up here to work my father’s farm, we begged her, begged and beseeched her to come with us but … Her home had a floor just like this one.’ Looking down, she pounds the toe of her boot onto the packed dirt. ‘Being poor in Calabria is akin to misery.’ Raising her eyes back to mine, she says, ‘She was very tall, dark-skinned, night-black eyes, so black they looked silver. Not big, her eyes, but long like wide slits of light in the smooth darkness of her face. Cosima, she was called.’

‘You are very much describing your husband. His eyes are …’

‘They are. Just like hers. Pierangelo Santacaterina. Such a name. Eleven syllables. I loved him instantly.’

‘Calabria, Umbria, how did you find one another?’

‘I was nearing twenty-five, a perilous age to be still a virgin since, back then, it was somewhere shy of thirty when una ragazza singola, an unmarried girl, was edged over into the rank of la zitella, an old maid. Not only had I yet to live a love story but, worse, I’d yet to dream one. I was too happy, too full being my parents’ child, my brother’s sister, my larger family’s preferita, their favourite.

‘Though I didn’t understand it then, my father worked toward this extended “adolescence” of mine. Subtly, he schemed to insure it: “The world is evil. Stay at home as long as you can.” He kept me tethered tight as a wayward goat but most fathers did in those days. Sometimes in their own interest, I admit. My father, though, he was gentle and proper as he was devoted.

‘He drove me to school in the ape and either he or my brother was there to fetch me when class ended. No matter where I went, someone from the family always went with me. As I think about it, they needn’t have bothered so much about me. I was plain and timid and awkward, a trio of barriers potent as black plague when it came to keeping the boys away. And by some standards, we were poor – that might have been the cherry. But I didn’t mind much. I was a pataciona, a big potato, mature in body, a little girl in spirit. I really don’t recall suffering for this sentimental exclusion by my peers. I do, however, remember that my maternal grandmother could make me cry.

‘Before every meal for the two summer months when she stayed with us, she would take the day’s pagnotta and go to sit in her chair by the spent hearth. Tucking the great loaf neatly under her chins, resting it like a violin on the shelf of her bosom, she’d slice at the bread in the exuberant sawing motions of capriccio – always toward her – the pieces falling into a basket she held tight between her knees. As though the feat itself were not enough of a spectacle, she also talked to me while she sawed: how to fix my hair or my dress, when to wear the gold hoop earrings, when to wear the ones with little red stones. Was I washing my face with olive oil twice a week? The times I hated most, though, were when she would pull a length of butcher’s twine from her pocket, turn me to face the wall, stretch the string taut against my backside then hold out the length of it for me to see, tsk, tsking, saying, “And this is only half the circumference of those prosperous hips of yours, amore mio.” That damn piece of string haunted me. She’d pull it out once a week and put me through the same agony. She’d always end the event by saying, “Ninuccia, Ninuccia … all that white meat of yours.” Anyway, after what she’d sliced of the pagnotta for breakfast and lunch, there wasn’t so much left of the two-kilo loaf by suppertime. Still she sawed and still she talked until the heel of it hit the basket. She’d always close her performance with the same line: “It wants a rather particular sort to court a girl like you.”

‘It was she, this grandmother of mine, who made me feel odd and strange and unworthy. I might have borne those sensations for always save that, one afternoon, Pierangelo Santacaterina stopped by.’

All this while as she was speaking, Ninuccia gazed up and down and beyond where we sat. Everywhere but at me. As though I was in a room nearby, the door ajar – clandestine, mute – she wanted me to hear her story rather than tell it to me. Neither a question nor an affirmation, she would suffer no hindrance to memory’s course. Ninuccia’s was a soliloquy.

‘I’d been weeding in the orto, barefoot, bent to the earth, skirt kilted to my hips, fairly blind from the sun. My first glimpse of him was upside down, between my legs. He scared me so I screeched and nearly fell over trying to right myself. Shading my eyes with both hands, I tried to see him, and asked: “Chi desidera? Who do you desire?” He laughed and shook his head and laughed again, finally saying he had an appointment with my father. I think I gestured to the house, “Si accomodi. Be comfortable.” I remember sliding my kerchief from my head, letting my hair down, wiping my face with that sweat-soaked thing, stumbling a few times before getting my feet to move in synchrony so I could run off toward the field where my father was working.

But how did this Calabrian find his way to us? you must be wondering. Essentially it was via the clans. ’Ndrangheta. The Calabrian mafia. That is, the Calabrian mafia in its most delicate incarnation. As so many men – and boys, too – were and are wont to do in those parts, Pierangelo made his living doing the clans’ bidding. You see, a few days before Pierangelo’s appearance on the farm my father had been refused a loan at the Cassa di Risparmio in Orvieto. Bankers are often as diffident to modest desires as they are malleable to excessive ones. Pierangelo was entrenched in an unofficial partnership with the very banker who refused my father. This banker would purposefully decline requests for relatively small short-term loans and then send his “partner” – in the guise of an independent estimator – to view the needy person’s property or land or machinery, and, after lengthy deliberation, agree to lend the funds, if at a somewhat higher rate of interest than the bank’s. Distilled, Pierangelo and the banker were in league with a band of truffatori – swindlers, thieves, forgers, usurers. Having first put the banker in place, Pierangelo’s clan then sent him north to have a go at the Umbrian pigeons set up by the banker. That’s how Pierangelo Santacaterina came to Umbria. And for some mystical reason, which I have yet to comprehend, he wanted me: me, la pataciona.

‘After that first sighting – Pierangelo of me and I of him – the business of the loan turned to figment, pretext for his further visits to my father. I would pass through the salotto as they sat with their grappa and their discourse and station myself – skirt fanned, legs crossed in feint nonchalance – on the veranda to await his arrivals and departures. Much later would my father tell me that, on his second visit, Pierangelo Santacaterina asked him for my hand. Dismissing ritual queries and a decorous phase of observation, my father surrendered to the sufficiency of his instinct and to, what he perceived to be, the will of the Fates. My father told Pierangelo Santacaterina that he believed I was already his.

‘When he began to court me and spend Sundays at our place, everyone was all a titter. “Ninuccia ha un ragazzo. E che ragazzo, mamma mia.” As handsome as he is now, when he was twenty-five, he could stop your breath. Even my grandmother loved him. She began the butcher-string business with him, too, measuring not his backside but his shoulders and, as dismayed as she was with my measurement, that’s how thrilled she was with his. She took to measuring me with one string, he with another. Then she’d stretch the two strings, one against the other, demonstrating that they were just about equal: the breadth of Pierangelo’s shoulders and that of my backside. Ach. But I was speaking of Cosima, wasn’t I?

‘Pierangelo spoke often and lovingly of his mother. “She and home are the same thing for me. Now you and she are my home.” I’d never met Cosima until Pierangelo and I – married two days before in the town hall in Orvieto – made our way, in his heroic nineteen-year-old white Cinquecento, up into the isolation of the Aspromonte.

‘Aspromonte, bitter mountain. My husband had, at length and most candidly, spoken of the village where he was born and had always lived, enumerating on the fingers of both his hands the perils, the hardships, the dissimilarities between the modest idyll of my Umbrian life and the one I would meet in Acquapendente di Sopra, a village of sixty-three souls, “if no one’s died or been born since Christmas when I was last there”. Sixty-three souls, some of them damned, he said. Shaking my head, muffling his warning speeches with my hand or my mouth, all I wanted was him. But he would persist: “Many of the men stay down in the seaside villages to fish, selling their catch to the restaurants, only wandering back up to the mountains once a week for conjugal visits, to leave a wad of bills, often thin. When called upon they perform simple favours for the clans. Or more complex ones, as I did with the banker. But that’s over now. I’ll invent something else. No, of course not. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous.” As we withdrew that afternoon further into the wilderness, I began to feel a kind of qualm, mild enough at first before building to a tease, to a menace and causing my chatter to sound tinny, far away. Someone else’s noise. I would look at my husband who looked only ahead, the muscles in his face rippling under flesh gone white. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous.

‘Hung from a mountain spur two thousand metres above the sea, the village seemed a pile of Iron Age stones relieved here and there by a ruin from the epochs of the Greeks and the Romans. Though people were about the narrow lanes in front of and between the houses, so pure was the silence that I’d thought to have lost the capacity to hear. Later Pierangelo would explain to me that it wasn’t silence I heard but the great, incessant noise of streams and torrents and waterfalls that surrounded the place. Aquapendente, falling waters. It was the raucous crashing of water that I took for silence.

‘Pierangelo stopped the auto in a curve of the unpaved road in front of a long, narrow stone building that would have seemed abandoned were it not for wisps of woodsmoke rising from four chimneys and window curtains of bright-coloured cloth swelling in the breeze. Four separate dwellings were suggested by as many wooden doors, one of them opened to reveal a room not two metres high, a bed and a chair filling its whole space. A small flock of scraggy, brownish sheep were being rallied through the lanes by two despotic dogs and I remember waiting until the parade passed before opening the auto door. And then I saw Cosima. She’d come, unnoticed by me, to within a metre or so of us and there she stood, arms crossed over her chest, weeping and smiling. In a shapeless black dress and men’s shoes too large, she was a romantic figure, a kind of timid enchantress from whom someone had stolen her real clothes. I waited for Pierangelo to go to her but he sat quietly in his seat. I stepped out and Cosima stepped closer – another kind of love at first sight. Gathering me to her, saying a few words of welcome, our sympathies were immediate, reciprocal, tender. All that I loved about my husband was authenticated in her. His cautionary tales he needn’t have told but rather he should have trusted his mother to be also mine, and to know that both would be my shelter.

‘Cosima’s house was the most spacious of the four in the low stone dwelling with its blue shale roof and paint-peeled doors. The walls she whitewashed every Easter and Christmas and the packed-earth floor had so long been swept and trod upon that it had the texture and the sheen of stone. In the sitting room there were white-painted iron sconces on the walls, only occasionally stuck with light bulbs, hand-hewn chairs also painted white, a kind of sofa strewn in a length of salvaged boat sail from the seaside markets and a woodpile laid neat and even. In the kitchen there were four more chairs about a small square wooden table scrubbed nearly to splintering and a pile of plates in a basket by the hearth. Three pots hung from the stones above the hearth shelf, though two were for show since Cosima always reached for the same one no matter what she was about to cook. In the sleeping room there was a small white bed and a trunk larger than it on which stood two tall silver candlesticks, almost garish in that setting, about which she never spoke. Only a sheaf of evergreen or a bottle stuck with wildflowers intruded upon the shades of white in Cosima’s house and the dark figure of her moving about against the pale light there made a quadro vivente, primitive, calming.

‘The sail-clothed sofa became Cosima’s bed and there was never a word of bickering among us about her will to relinquish the sleeping room: “The sofa had been Pierangelo’s and now it will be mine. The bed had been mine and now it will be yours.” Cosima had a wondrous way of weeding her discourse, plunging as she did to the marrow of a thing. And her talk reflected her resolve, her ideas slow-ripening as mountain fruit. She seemed free of dilemma. Hers was a road straight, cleared of obstacles, immutable. Divine in its way. Even her wrath she managed with serenity. No bile, no hackles, never demurring from her path, she could unburden rage as genteelly as she could embrace peace. “Lament is futile. Scorn makes bitterness. Vendetta soothes,” she would say.

‘Pierangelo soon slipped back into the life he’d led before his sojourn to Umbria. Before us. Setting out with his former mates to fish for tuna, he’d stay away for three or four days, return for one or two, before going off again. I knew it wasn’t always to the sea where Pierangelo went. Normal as raising sheep or fishing the seas, working a job now and then for the clans. “We all do it. Nothing dangerous. I told you, nothing dangerous at all.”

‘Meanwhile I learned more about my mother-in-law. Unsought, unacknowledged by her, Cosima had long ago been assigned to the province of myth by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra, she having ministered to two generations of them since she was in her early adolescence. In her men’s black shoes and her shapeless black dress, loping over the fields or between the lanes, she’d be bent on birthing babies, washing the dead, keeping vigil over the sick. Pulling an anise cake from her basket, the perfumed thing still warm from her hearth, she could light up gloom by walking through the door. But her more constant sympathies Cosima reserved for the seven women who lived within her nearest reach in the three houses attached to hers.

‘Save when they slept or on the occasions when their husbands or sons were at home, the seven and Cosima were together. In summer they cooked in the spare kitchen of the deconsecrated church’s cellar where it was cool. In winter when the cellar was cheered only by a small hearth by which hermit monks once warmed themselves, they cooked together there as well, neither knowing how to nor desiring to live separately from one another. Bringing shaped and risen loaves covered with cloths to the communal oven, which sat in a clearing of oak scrub just outside the village, they’d settle themselves on stones or among the weeds with their knitting while their bread baked. On Mondays, they mounted their washing in baskets on their heads and walked to one or another of the nearby streams, whichever one was rushing good and fast. At noon they ate bread and cheese from their pockets and, at sunset, laid supper on a table in the front lane when it was fair or piled together in one of their houses or back in the church cellar when it was cold. The table cleared away, their kitchen chairs in a half circle in the lane, they’d once again pick up their needles and yarn and talk and work and sing. Santo cielo, sainted heaven, how they could sing. Not an alto among them, they raised their seven soprano voices in a blaze of plainsong or chanted and keened as women before them had chanted and keened in those mountains for thousands of years, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

‘And so I went about my days as they did theirs, blithe as well-loved children. Their almost breezy sanguinuity sprang, it seemed, from their abiding concern for one another, each one trusting the others to be thinking of her while she was thinking of them. Though those who were widows – Cosima and two others – were pensioned by the State and the others supported, more or less, by their husbands, their economic lives were mostly operated collectively. Whoever had, shared. Cosima was their purser. They worked an orto, kept hens and raised rabbits, and bartered lamb and cheese from the shepherds. They decided upon things by “committee”: who was to get her boots repaired, her knives sharpened, her teeth fixed, how much wood was to be cut, which mattresses were to be restuffed. What they didn’t grow in their orto or forage in the meadows and the woods, they bought from the fruttivendolo ambulante, the travelling fruit and vegetable wagon, on Saturday. And to supplement mean times – their own or, more often, those of their neighbours – they sold their handiwork: prized by the fancy women of Reggio and Catanzaro were the table covers and bedspreads of vast dimension and heirloom design, which were crocheted by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra from white cotton string, tea-dyed to a pallid amber brown. And what they didn’t knit or sew, they would fetch in the markets, riding down the mountain to Reggio in the Thursday or the Saturday bus several times a year. You will recall that it was 1969 when I arrived in Acquapendente di Sopra. That these women lived then in that cloistered self-sufficiency seems an imponderable truth. Having so little, they were free to have everything.’

•

Never asking me if I’d wanted another caffé, Ninuccia has been up and down, slapping the wet grains from the Bialetti into the sink, rinsing all its parts, spooning out more ground espresso, packing it into place, filling the pot with water. Never breaking the stride of her story, she lights the burner, sits down. We avoid one another’s gaze. I don’t want to hear more of this story. I don’t want this Cosima to be relegated to fable. I want to know her. I am wishing that I was her. At the least, I want to be there with her, with all of them. I belong there. I’m certain of this. How can it be that I am feeling the loss of a woman I never knew, would never know? I think of their soprano voices in the evening, under the mountains.

My throat tightens, tears threaten. I think how absurd is this response of mine to the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. I will drink this fresh caffé and then explain to Ninuccia that I really must go. First I will steer our talk to the present. To the less remote past.

‘I never knew it was you who began the Thursday Night Suppers. I mean, with Miranda.’

‘Those Marvellous Thursday Nights, that’s what Cosima called them. Yes, yes, it was me who carried the idea home to Miranda years ago when I returned from Calabria. Missing life with Cosima and the women as I did, I’d hoped to feed my nostalgia for those nights in the mountains by raising up some kinship here in Umbria. Of course, it was not at all the same. I should never have expected it to be. What they had and who they were in Calabria and what we have and who we are here … was unequal. Discordant. How could I expect to satisfy them with what had delighted Cosima’s tribe?’

‘I would cook a pot of beans, not so different from that one over there, and call it Thursday Night Supper. There were more of us back then, sometimes as many as twenty squeezed into the rustico. I’d ladle out beans or some thick soup of barley and spelt scented with whatever herbs were near. Bread, wine. Of course, there was always cheese. Once I made la polenta in catene – cornmeal in chains – thin cornmeal mixed with stewed white beans spooned into deep bowls over bread. Filiberto called it war food. He remembered his father hanging a sardine from a string tied to the light above the kitchen table; the oil dripping from the little fish was the only condiment for his family’s nightly polenta during the meanest years. His father never changed the sardine for another until only bones swung from the string.

‘“We’d cut a piece of the flat, yellow pudding, swipe it across the sardine, trying to wet it with the little fish’s salty oil,” Filiberto told us. “There was watered wine until that ran out. Nothing of bread.”

‘Filiberto’s stories led to Miranda’s,’ Ninuccia says.

‘Not only at your table,’ she said, trying for Miranda’s voice. My family fared better than most of our ilk, I having begun working as maid and kitchen apprentice for the Giacomini when I was sixteen. I’m not telling you that their stores allowed the usual five-course lunch and the thick soups and cheeses and dry sausages and six or seven conserva di frutta, which composed their light supper of an evening. Deep pockets, the black market, they ‘arranged’ things. Everyday Cook sent me home with almost enough to feed my family. Six of us and my mother – my father already gone by that time. Cook and also Signora Giacomini, I think, knew I supplemented their gifts with my own mild thieving – mostly soap and flour. A kilo of flour consoled my mother. Soap, too. At least her children would be clean, would have bread. My brothers were apprentices of a sort, too, running and fetching for the Partigiani even though the youngest was ten when things went bad. Sometimes one of them would come home with a sack of eggs, as many as five or six, and I think it was those eggs that saved us as much as anything. I’ve always thought it was the eggs. I took to bringing Giorgia, then nine or ten, with me to the Giacomini each morning, knowing that Cook would sit her down, fill a bowl with some sort of pap – sometimes a piece of bread with sugar. Can you imagine sugar during the war? The grace of the Giacomini gave way, though, when I trooped in with two cousins, the daughters of my mother’s sister, who was faring less well than we. They were kind about drawing the line but draw it they did. Years afterward I remember my aunt telling how they survived for weeks and months on a prized two-kilo tin of salted Spanish anchovies. I remember that tin – wedged between the more usual goods – in the kitchen armoire. It had been there for years, maybe as many as ten, as though my aunt knew to save it. Red and blue and foreign-looking. Sometimes I would pull it forward on the shelf, finger all the writing on it that I couldn’t read. A gift from someone who’d travelled to Spain. I don’t remember who. When there was nothing left but sacks of polenta, my aunt opened the tin, her two tiny girls standing on chairs to watch her. The story goes that, without bothering to rinse away their preserving salt, she mashed a few of the fish to a paste, mixed in whatever broth she’d brewed that morning from wild herbs and then spread the mess thinly over their nightly polenta.

‘“Ninuccia’s polenta is hardly war food,” Miranda told Filiberto that evening, mortifying him as much with her gaze as with her words. It was the first time I’d ever heard her speak with pure contempt. Not the last, though. I think it was when she told us that story of the anchovies that I knew I loved Miranda. I think it was that night. In any case, Filiberto sought immediate reparation by rising from his place, coming to me, taking both my hands, kissing the palms. Once back in his chair, he looked at Miranda. After a moment or two he said:

Winter was the worst: being hungry and being cold, too. We had snow one year, an unusual amount. Surely it was the first snow of my own young life. Exciting as it was, it faded soon enough to tedium. We’d just kneel in front of the window watching it fall. One morning, a hungry morning, my father wrapped us in some sort of shawl or blanket, brought us to the door, opening it to a moaning wind. He said, ‘Look out there, do you see it? Do you see all that bread under the snow? Can’t you see it? Close your eyes, imagine all that germination going on deep under the insulating snow. When it melts, even though the earth will still be brown and bare, there’ll be bright shoots sticking their heads straight up to the sun. Acres of young wheat. Loaves and loaves of good crusty bread.’ Of course it was a lie. Sometimes all we have are lies.

‘We others were not old enough to remember the war, some of us not yet born. We listened to the polenta stories and the bread-growing-under-the-snow as to fables but when the solemn moment passed the tribe sat, forks pointing north, waiting for what would next be brought to table. The first of my suppers were not a successs.

‘But Miranda had understood what I’d had in mind to make of Thursday nights and so she began to help me, to choose and cook dishes that, though they resonated less abundant times, had some chance at pleasing.

‘One time we begged lambs’ innards from the butcher who bought stock from Filiberto, and brought them back to the rustico almost still pulsing. We set pancetta and salt pork to melt over a quiet flame with rosemary, onion, garlic and peperoncino and gilded it all until the smell it sent up set our mouths to watering. Meanwhile we chopped the innards almost to a pulp and added them to the pot, marrying them to the hot, perfumed fat. A little sea salt, a litre of red, tomato conserve, all of it distilling down to a delectable mash to spread on thick slabs of roasted bread. Miranda called it soffritto di agnello, said it was a piquant second cousin to the traditional Roman dish coratella (lamb innards stewed in white wine with fennel and sage) and even closer kin to the lampredotto of the Tuscans (veal stomach stewed with tomato, onion, celery and spooned onto trenchers of crusty bread). Il soffritto won a restrained sort of applause but, as before, the group sniffed about for what would come next and then next after that.

‘Once Miranda and I bartered with the Catanzarese in the market: eight dozen baby artichokes for two rounds of Filiberto’s pecorino. The colour of violets and tiny as a baby’s fist, 20 centimetres of leafy stem. All we did was light the wood oven, peel the stems, cut them in two and let them sit in lemon water for half an hour. Into three oiled terracotta dishes, we laid them down in a single layer, poured in white wine – only about half an inch – then dusted them with sea salt and bread crumbs, gave them a good dose of oil and let them roast slowly until their chokeless hearts were soft. Then we heaved on fistsful of grated pecorino, poured on another thread of oil and slid the dishes back into the oven until the cheese went bronze. The group poked at the tiny little crisped things, spooned one or two out to taste, all the while mumbling that no decent artichoke was roasted but braised in white wine with lemon and mint, this latter another dish that the Umbrians borrow from the Roman canons. Eight people devoured ninety-six artichokes, slid bread in the juices of the terracotta dish closest to them, moved brazenly to polish juices in the further territory of the other dishes. “Buoni, buoni da vero, ma adesso? Good, very good, but now?”

‘“Le fritatte di bruscandoli, wild asparagus omelettes,” I told them, proud as if the dishes I carried from behind the bedsheet curtain were set with truffle-stuffed songbirds. I was so excited to tell them about the gifts from the gods Miranda and I had found on the far hillside behind the sheepfold, a great patch of the skinny brown twig-like things, which make only a fleeting spring appearance but almost never in any but sparse quantity. A savour to which no cultivated asparagus could ever aspire, they taste like roasted hazelnuts. Delicate …’

•

‘You mean, luppoli, hops. Bruscandoli are wild hops and not asparagus at all but there is great controversy among the cognoscenti over this distinction. I would wait for them every May to arrive by boat from the island of Sant’Erasmo to the Rialto. For risotto. However many the foragers would bring to the markets, the chefs from Harry’s Bar always got most of the bounty. But I managed. I’d begin my haunting of the marketeers for them around Easter time. I …’

Ninuccia will not tolerate interruption. This one of mine was made of words she hadn’t heard. Before I finish speaking, she proceeds: ‘As you know, Miranda had – long before this beginning of the Thursday Nights – begun to offer supper three or four evenings a week to the truckers and the nearby farm families. And it was that uniquely Miranda sort of supper that they all expected on Thursday nights. The group wholly embraced the idea of sitting down to supper together in the rustico every Thursday but how and what I longed to feed them, they did not embrace at all.’

Having been looking down at her hands or perusing the room while she spoke, Ninuccia takes a breath, looks at me.

‘A grand part of why I bewailed the thought of you in the rustico kitchen was raised up from the unhealed part of my old resentment at having failed to please the others. If I couldn’t, how could you? Of all people, why should it be a stranger who would cook for us? I remain distrustful, I want you to know that. Wary. I’m wary still but less so for two reasons: I know that Miranda will be hovering and that one of us will always be there to keep you in line, save you from committing foolishness. As I said, I wanted you to know all that.’

‘Good.’ I smile at her. Having expected something of defence from me, she waits, lifts her gaze to mine before looking down again at her hands, perusing the room.

‘In any case, I stopped bringing my pots of soup or beans and Miranda pushed her sack of polenta to the back of the armoire. Every Tuesday we all brought what we had to her and every Thursday Miranda cooked for us.’

‘Every Thursday until …’

‘Until now. But how far I’ve wandered. From Cosima. From the mountains.’

‘You must be tired and …’

‘No, no. Not at all, not tired,’ she says, raising a hand to cover her smile, an uncommonly girlish gesture for Ninuccia. ‘The truth is that I never wander very far from her. From Cosima. From the mountains. Never very far. I still compare them, you know. The Thursday Nights there, ours here. A foolish exercise. Quei Meravigliosi Giovedì Sere. Those Marvellous Thursday Nights with Cosima. Though the theme was the same as every other night – cosa c’e, c’e– what there is, there is – little fistsful of hoarded things would appear on the Thursday work tables. Cosima and the others would take stock and get to work. A favourite dish was one of long, slender sweet green capsicums stuffed with old bread softened in white wine, dried olives, raisins, pine nuts, capers, pecorino, bits of lamb if they had it, an egg, maybe two, and handfuls of wild greens if it was spring. Laid on a grate high over the slow fire they took turns roasting them, painting them with oil, gently turning them until they blistered, plumped, a tin underneath to catch their juices. There’d be a sauce ready to pour over the hot things, a smash of garlic, oil, lots of onion shaved thin, red wine vinegar added to the hot juices in the tin. How good they were. And we drank wine on Thursdays, shunning the water pitcher.

‘Cosima always baked her anisella. With a quarter-litre jar and a screw top in her pocket, she’d walk the two kilometres or so through the woods to the bottiglieria, the tiny wine dispensary, to fetch a dose of anisette. Eggs, oil, sugar, flour and anise seeds toasted in a hot pan, she’d pour the batter into a round tin, large and shallow, cover it with a pot lid, reversed and filled with hot embers, and settle the whole into the white hot ash of her hearth.

‘On Thursday Nights the women dressed as they might for mass had there been a priest to celebrate it. And if there had been a priest, I’d have wondered at the women’s will to share their pagan affinities for an hour with he and Mother Church. The old goddesses were their confidantes, their undisputed authorities and, being so familiar with them, they’d call upon Hera and Hestia, Aphrodite, Artemis and Demeter, as they would neighbours from a village down the mountain. They knew too much, the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. They knew that the clans and the Church and the State were as united a family as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But there I go again, wandering.

‘In any case, the women’s toilettes were enhanced on Thursdays, all of them primping in their way, patting Borotalco from a green and gold tin over freshly bathed bodies, braiding hair or twisting it into intricate knots, festooning themselves with bits of matriarchal jewels and a change of dress. The eldest was forty-eight, the youngest perhaps forty and it was she who, with a sharpened wedge of wood burnt to charcoal, would, always on a Thursday, draw black lines along the slant of her eyelids and I swear those two lines changed how she moved, how she spoke and smiled.

‘Oh, yes, does it surprise you how young they all were? Had you been conjuring a bevy of ancients? And have you been wondering about their children?

‘Well, those who’d mothered sons had seen them off to their labours by then, down the mountain or to a marriage with a girl from the cities, while their daughters had, likewise, followed their husbands’ paths. Just as I’d done. For some, visits to or from their children were rare enough. Life in the mountains is often lived in epochs – clearly marked – one ending, the next beginning, in a succession natural as the seasons, children yearning sometimes to forget from whence they came, their parents, having loved them well, trusting their babies to the Fates, to the old goddesses. Now, all that about children, that wasn’t what you’d call meandering, was it? Maybe just a little.’

•

By now I am captive to Ninuccia. I know nothing of the present. How long have we been sitting here at the long wooden table in the mill? Someone has lit candles in the lanterns, which hang from iron hooks here and there about the place. I know that Ninuccia has placed a string of those half-dried figs near to my hand, that she has pushed toward me the roasted bread that one of the cousins brought to the table. From the tail of my eye, I am aware of men and women who come and go, lugging sacks of olives, carrying away wooden boxes filled with two-litre bottles of new oil. I hear the sound of stones crushing the fruit, the gentle brays of the velvet-eyed she-ass. Ninuccia stops only to eat a fig.

•

‘Cosima. Cosima wore the same dress every Thursday. The colour was of a kind of pewter iridescence that shimmered gold when she moved in it, the heavy silk falling like warmed metal and sheathing the long, skinny frame of her. Her husband had brought it home on the night of her twenty-first birthday. She said she knew it had been thieved, that dress – a spoil from some larger plundering. She said she’d been sure his treachery was greater than that which would yield the humble haul of a pewter-coloured dress.

‘On a January dawn less than a month later, while she was still abed with two-year-old Pierangelo asleep beside her, Cosima heard the dull thud her husband’s corpse made as it smite the lane outside the cottage door. She’d always expected it, she knew, she said. She pulled at the bed cover, wadded it up her arms and, barefoot, went to him, covering him, swaddling him, dragging and pushing and pulling him into the house. Not meaning to, she said, she lay down on top of him and rocked and wept until she noticed that Pierangelo, also rocking and weeping, had lain down next to her, next to his father. In that truculent way of hers, Cosima told me this and then never spoke of it again. When once I asked Pierangelo to tell me of his father’s death, he looked at me, held my gaze so fast and hard it frightened me. When he looked away, he said, “I don’t know. No one ever knows.”

‘When Cosima wore the dress on Thursday nights, she’d always say how she preferred her black one, that any other one felt like someone else’s. Her heart-shaped lips compressed, nearly stretched into a smile, she’d touch the bodice, pat her hands cautiously here and there about the dress and wonder aloud if it truly had once been someone else’s. And if it had, she wondered, too, who was that someone else? What was she like? And what had her husband known of her?

‘One evening while we sat out in the lane, she pulled the dress from her work sack, proceeded to cut off the sleeves, frayed and split as they were. Piecing together the remnants into one long length, she wrapped it about her head, securing the ends under her braids. She looked up at me, the metallic glint of the headdress dancing in her eyes like moonshine and, on the next Thursday when she wore it with the dress, I thought, at last, that Cosima had the right clothes for an enchantress. She never wore any other shoes, though, than the too-large black men’s oxfords or, in winter, Pierangelo’s discarded hunting boots. Had she manoeuvred things in another way, Cosima might have had more – more clothes, more comforts. Once when I asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to have …” it was the only time I saw her veer toward anger. “Non hai capito niente. L’abbondanza é pericolosa. You’ve understood nothing. Abundance is perilous.”

‘Were any of the men at home on a Thursday, they would sit and eat and drink with us, having first made their own extraordinary ablutions for the event. White shirts, starched, ironed, buttoned to the neck, jeans or black trousers tucked into boots and, smelling of bergamot and red wine, their skins dark and luminous in the candlelight, they were knights errant, intriguing, erotic, fresh from battle, more lovers than husbands. As I was living it, that divided life seemed a noble one, unmuddied as it was by the niggling hostilities and household tyrannies of an everyday life. When we were together, we seemed new and, I think, exotic to one another. Every time was the first time. When we were apart, well, that’s how it was. Men left to their machinations and their swaggering. To their whoring. Maybe to their whoring. Women – loosed from the quotidian needs and wants of a domesticated man – could tend to one another, to their babies, to themselves and their own modo d’essere, their own way of being. To their own swagger and lust, I don’t know. I shall admit that for all these years since we returned to Orvieto I’ve adored that every-evening moment when I lay down with Pierangelo, limbs tangled, his breath even on my cheek. Still, there was something about that other way of being a couple, that other reality, which was good.

‘Thursday Nights notwithstanding, I need not tell you that storms shook the lives of the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. No, I needn’t tell you that. But it was Cosima who kept things apace. Boiling up the mess of life until it came out right, she could lull an anguish, knead a rogue terror into calm, stir beans and potatoes into a feast, she could do that. All this sway of hers, though, was wider than over the seven women. You see, Cosima had a niece.

•

‘Sitting not a hundred metres from Cosima’s place, Sofia lived in the borghetto, a group of cottages clustered on a rise and surrounded by tilled fields and sheepfolds, all of it the property of Sofia’s husband’s family. The daughter and only child of Cosima’s younger brother, Sofia had been orphaned when she was eleven years old. That would have been seventeen years before my time in Acquapendente di Sopra. Sofia was twenty-eight when I met her. Having in some manner displeased the clans, Sofia’s parents – Cosima’s brother and his wife – had also been dispatched in ritual fashion: he heaved into the lane, throat slit, castrated, his severed member placed in his mouth to stifle his final scream; the corpse of his wife strewn, nude and raped, in a ditch in the nearby woods. Cosima took Sofia to live with her and Pierangelo and there Sofia remained until her marriage to Lamberto – eldest son of the “richest” family in the village – when she went to live with him in the borghetto.

Lamberto, too, did the clans’ bidding. It wasn’t that the malevolence of the clans was less than brazenly clear to him – or to the other men, for that matter – rather it was that each man thought himself to be above or beyond that brazen malevolence. In the way that the rest of us believe dying happens to others, each man in the village took a turn believing that his rapport with the clans would end in riches and glory. Never in a stifled scream. Never him.

‘As did the other men, Lamberto lived a once-in-a-while life in the village, spending more of his time soldiering for the clans. This despite his relative familial wealth. This despite his undisguised love for Sofia and the twin daughters who’d been born to them only days after my arrival in Acquapendente di Sopra. Surrounded, coddled – perhaps suffocated – as she and her baby daughters were by the women in Lamberto’s extended family, Sofia only infrequently visited her aunt Cosima. When she did wander down the rise and through the woods to us, each of her fat cherubs tucked into her own sack, the sacks criss-crossed upon Sofia’s chest, Cosima’s mood was festal. But as much as Cosima would dandle and coo to the baby girls, it was Sofia upon whom her gaze lingered, Cosima never having, I think, outlived the time when Sofia was her own baby girl.

‘But even greater than first-blood kinship, there was another connection between Cosima and Sofia. That Cosima’s husband and Sofia’s father – who was, you’ll recall, Cosima’s brother – had been entrenched in the higher echelons of the clans, that their murders both bore the grotesque clan shibboleth, this was the crucial tie that bound Cosima and Sofia. And when one of Lamberto’s sisters came screaming to our door so early one morning that the light was still grey, Cosima, bent to the fire toasting bread while I was seeing to the coffee, took her shawl from a hook near the hearth and walked behind the woman to the borghetto. I walked behind Cosima.

‘It was December. Someone, one of the shepherds I think, had carried Lamberto’s body into an outbuilding under the main house, thinking to wait until Sofia had been told before bringing him upstairs. Cosima set to work, sending me to fetch oil, to ask for the finest sheets in the house. Candles, incense. Cosima decided that Sofia would never see her husband until she had prepared him, washed him like a newborn, swaddled him in scented linens so that only his head was free, the cloth cunningly wrapped to cover his garrotted throat, and the other indignities that had been perpetrated upon him. She lit six candles around the wooden table where he lay. Then she called for Sofia.

‘Having left Sofia to be alone with Lamberto, Cosima soon joined me outdoors, gestured for me to follow along a beaten path to a shed of sorts, which housed a stove, a stone sink, a work table already laid with baskets of eggs, vegetables, meats, oil, wine, a bin of flour, other things she’d asked to be brought to her. From the rafters of the shed, haunches of prosciutto were aging and, hung by their feet from a wire strung along one wall, freshly killed pheasants and guinea hens twisted in the breezes seeping through the cracks of the rough wooden walls. There was an electric light bulb in a wire frame above the work table. Patting the surface of the table with one hand, Cosima said, “This is where they butcher pigs. By the smell in the air, I’d say they slaughtered one a few days ago. Maybe yesterday.” Walking about the room, inspecting the pans and cooking pots, shuffling through them until she found what she needed, she sniffed the air. “C’è una puzza. There’s a stink.” She walked along the wire where the birds were hung, sniffing and inspecting, finding nothing amiss until, toward the end of the wire, she discovered the cause of the stink.

‘“Pig testicles. As I said, they must have slaughtered yesterday. These are fresh off the beast and need to be hung for a day or so to release the poison. Then a saltwater bath, a scrubbing, another day under salt, a bath in white wine and herbs. A long procedure. Polluted things. Worth the work, though. Delicious in a soffritto. Untreated, they are deadlier than an amanita. Once we get onions and garlic moving in a pan, we’ll hardly notice the hideous things,” she said, already ripping skins from onions.

‘Leaving the women of Lamberto’s family to their mourning, Cosima would prepare the vigil supper for that evening. For a long time I don’t think she said a word save to direct me to the next job and the next one after that. At one point, though, and without raising her head from her task, she said, “The one who murdered him will come to offer condolences to Sofia this evening. All part of the clans’ love of spectacle. They always send the assassin to visit the widow. A mass card, an envelope filled with lira. He will take Sofia’s hand in both of his. Perhaps he will weep. And then he will sit down to supper.”

‘Her face was contorted as she spoke, her breath coming in gasps as though she’d been running, her smooth, dark skin leeched to white. I knew my telling her to sit a while would fall on deaf ears and so I stayed quiet at my work, only looking at her from the tail of my eye. Trying to breathe for her. After a while I remember asking her if we would stay to serve and she said we wouldn’t. We’d tell the maids what was what. She could trust them to the job. And then we’d go home.

‘When there seemed nothing left for me to do, I went to the stove where Cosima was still at work. “What is it that you’re preparing?”

‘“Un soffritto. Pancetta, lard, rosemary, garlic, onions, peperoncini, red wine, tomatoes. Spooned over bread, a little antipasto.”

‘“And in that other pan?” I pointed to a small battered saucepan on the back burner.

‘“More of the same. A bit of flesh in this one.”

‘“What sort?”

‘“Cosa c’era, c’era. What there was, there was.”

‘Covering the small battered saucepan with a soup plate, carrying it in both hands, she left the shed. She was gone for a long time; it seemed long. When she returned, her face was almost hers again. She went to the sink, scrubbed her hands, digging under her nails with a brush, letting water run and run over them. Drying them on an apron hung by the door, she reached for her shawl.

‘“Andiamo, tesoro. Let’s go, my darling.”

‘We walked out into the December afternoon, already dark, down the hill, back through the woods. Cosima held my hand. Having no need for words, we were free to listen to the shuddering of the pines as the wind rose. We both loved that sound, waited for it of an evening. As we walked I thought I was hardly certain of what Cosima did or didn’t do or meant to do back there in the grim little shed. If she wanted me to know, she would tell me. I would never ask her.

‘When we were back inside Cosima’s house she crouched to mend the fire, poked at it absently. Suddenly she stood. From the wood pile she lifted two logs, foisted them down from on high, bashing the embers as I saw her do to the head of a viper with a stone one day in the woods. Striking match after match, throwing down faggots of kindling still tied in their ropes, she willed the blaze to leap and rage, and it obeyed. Arms crossed upon her chest, she bent her body over the fire, pressed her forehead against the mantle shelf and wept. When she stood straight again, she held her hands above the flames for a while, taunting the fire to lick them. She dared the flames, dancing her hands lower, lower still, raising them only just in time.

‘Without turning to me, she said, “Maligno – fiend. Only vengeance can hinder a fiend. Tomorrow I will ride the bus to Reggio. I will go to offer condolences to his widow. Do you remember, tesoro? The assassin always visits the widow. Will you come with me, tesoro mio?”

•

Rising from her chair, her palms still flat on the table, Ninuccia looked at me from the still-faraway place where she’d been. Arranging her mouth in a smile then, she walked around the table to where I sat, cupped my face in her hands, moved it gently, side to side. An apologetic caress. Buttoning her sweater, she said, ‘They were patient with her, the clans, their admiration for her courage keeping them at bay for years. Patient but not forgetful, they took Cosima one evening a few months after we’d come back to live up here. Sparita. Disappeared. A respectful end, to disappear.’

•

I don’t remember driving home from the mill that evening. The first thing I do recall is seeing Fernando standing at the entrance to la Porta Romana, the Roman gate, as I drove through it. Ninuccia had called him, told him when I’d left her so he might anticipate my arrival back into town.

I stop the auto, push the window button. Resting his arms on the edge of the open window and the closed car door, he leans in to kiss me. He kisses me hard.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t … I never thought to …’

‘You aren’t going to tell me that you’ve been picking olives by the light of the moon, are you?’

‘No. I’m not going to tell you that. I …’

‘Miranda came by about seven, just about the time I was beginning to wonder about you. She told me she’d left you with Ninuccia, said I shouldn’t worry. Miranda-style, she marched right in, looked about for something to cook for my supper. I told her to wash her face and fix her hair, that I’d take her to Eliano for lamb ribs, scottaditta. I gave her your white shawl and we sat for a while downstairs and smoked cigars. And drank Campari. We waited until nine, just in case you might come home in time to go with us. I’d left you a note. When we walked into the darkened salon after eleven and knew you still hadn’t come, I stood out on the balcony, willing you to appear around the corner of the vicolo. I heard Miranda chuckling behind me saying that all was happening just as she knew it would. Whatever that meant. I wouldn’t let her drive home so late. She’s asleep in the downstairs bedroom.’

All of this he has recounted from his position of leaning into the open window. Now he opens the door, pulls me out and upright. He holds me as though I’d been gone for years. Or is it me holding him that way?

‘Calabria. She was telling me about the place where she lived. About the people … Fernando, I want us to go back again to those villages in the mountains, I …’

‘She could have driven you down there for all the time she spent telling you about it. Jesus. And don’t give me those eyes. Get inside. You can tell me all about it tomorrow. But whatever it is that you tell me, whatever it was that bewitched you tonight, we are not moving to Calabria.’

He sits in the driver’s seat, and guns the still-running car before taking it out of neutral. I get in on the passenger side, and tell him, ‘I’m not ready to go home. I have things I want to tell you now, things I want to think about. I wish I were a soprano.’

‘Cosa? What?’

‘I wish I were a soprano. I wish I could sing plainsong. I wish I knew how to …’

‘Is this about Calabria? Do I understand that you wish you were a Calabrian soprano?’ He tries for mirth but exasperation shows through. I can hardly blame him.

‘I’m sorry, I know you’re tired and …’

‘I’ve missed you. It’s only that. Every evening counts. I hate to miss one with you.’

‘Is that how you felt when I’d stay up half the night talking to B.?’

‘How did we get from Calabria and plainsong to B.?’

‘Something Miranda said to me not long ago. Did B. and I make you feel excluded? Did you ever think that I was … that I was in love with him?’

‘No, to the first. No, to the second. Almost, no. You were enchanted by him, he by you. A state that sometimes can exceed being in love. I never imagined you running off with him or … I loved him.’

‘I know.’

‘Would it hurt if I told you that he and I were closer than were the two of you?’

‘No. I think that’s true, enchantment being a barrier of sorts to love.’

‘Brava. Can we stop driving now? I know nothing about plainsong and I find your small raspy voice sensual.’

We park the car in Piazza Ipollito Scalza, climb the stairs at 34 to find Miranda building a midnight fire.

‘I couldn’t sleep. Are either of you hungry?’

‘No,’ we tell her in quiet unison.

‘Now that both of you are here, I can sleep,’ Fernando tells us. ‘Don’t either of you depart for Calabria until I awake.’ Fernando embraces Miranda. Then, the blueberry eyes admonishing, to me he says, ‘A presto, amore mio. Soon, my love.’

I urge Miranda back to bed. I go into the little red room where I work, search for a copy of a book I wrote in 1999. I find the chapter on Calabria:

… a region of loose precincts, mostly uninterrupted and surely untamed by time, nearly all of her is of mountains, the villages that bestride them, fortressed one from another, unsavvy to any but its own rites and rituals, its own dialect. Hers is a legacy of brigands. Of brigantesse. After the unification of Italy in 1861 and Rome’s decree against latifondismo – the holding of great parcels of land by a handful of citizens – the south was politically, spiritually abandoned. No enforcement, no intervention came from the new governors and an even more base epoch of serfdom, of insufficiency ensued. Unlike in other southern regions where the poor simply died of hunger or ran away from it, the Calabresi hoisted up their own impassioned service of justice. ’Ndrangheta it’s called. Having perfected if not refined its manners over the years, still ’ndrangheta ministers power over Calabria …

•

I have quietly opened the door to our bedroom thinking that, though only ten minutes had passed since he went upstairs, Fernando would be asleep. I’m not quite through the door when, up from the dark, he says, ‘What is it, what is it that draws you so compulsively to …?’

‘To whom? To what?’

‘To the primitive.’ He whispers this.

Throwing off my clothes, I settle myself next to him. I whisper, too. ‘Are you saying that Miranda is primitive? She or the others or …’

‘No. Yes. In a way she is, they are: their glaring forthrightness, their uncluttered wisdom. Their communalism.’

‘Do you think it’s not good that these things draw me to them?’

‘No. Not at all. But sometimes I wonder how, when you … when you began to desire to live the lives of your heroines. Now it’s Ninuccia.’

‘Not Ninuccia. Her mother-in-law. Cosima was her name.’

‘Cosima. Now it’s Cosima. In Sicily it was Tosca …’

‘And when I was young I wanted to be Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, neither of whom one could term primitive … Maybe when I lived in California I had a too-choking dose of ladies-who-lunch. I was thought primitive by their measure.’

‘What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to live in the Aspromonte or keep goats or sing plainsong all the better to emulate these women you admire. You already are who they are. You have their defiance. That may be the pith. Defiance. Wandering about in another mise, with another past, with other gifts than theirs, still, you are of them. Don’t you know that yet? It’s what B. saw, it’s what fascinated him. I can still hear his laugh that morning when he found you on the terrace in jeans and sandals with fourteen-centimetre heels. Already having lit the bread oven, skinned and fried a rabbit, you were slapping three kilos of bread dough on the table with the force of a Fury. You were wearing some sort of unlikely shirt. What was it?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You remember everything. It was a kind of …’

‘A brown taffeta bustier. And B. had done most of the skinning before he left the beast – headless, slit and deprived of its pluck – the day before. And I wore those sandals maybe twice in all the time we lived in San Casciano. You hate it when I wear workboots, think it odd when I wear shoes with high heels, but when I wear boots you ask whatever happened to all those beautiful shoes …’

‘You see? Defiance. For you there are only two kinds of footwear.’

‘Was it my primitiveness that drew you to me?’

‘I didn’t know it then, but, yes. I think it was. Most notably, the defiance part.’

•

‘Pronto.’ I fumble for the bedside telephone and my just-awakened voice is tentative, frightened. I think it’s the middle of the night.

‘Chou, buongiorno. Don’t tell me you’re still abed?’

‘Ninuccia. Buongiorno. I … we …’

‘Will you meet me at the mill in an hour? I think we should give that pasta a trial before tomorrow night. The wine and oil are there and I’ll bring pasta. Just the two of us, though I’ll tell Miranda and …’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Miranda … Why don’t you leave that to me … you see, she’s here. I mean I think she’s here …’

I call down the stairs to Miranda but there is no answer. I bathe, dress, leave Fernando to his sleeping. A dark blue paper-wrapped box tied in silver string waits on the kitchen table. Miranda has left croissants from Scarponi, prepared the Bialetti for the flame. A più tardi, later, she’s scrawled with a fountain pen on a piece of paper towel, the ink having seeped through to the tablecloth. Having no clock in the house nor watches for our wrists, we tell time mostly by the bells and those of the Duomo are now announcing a quarter to eleven. I call Miranda and tell her what Ninuccia has asked.

‘I’ll come back into town so you can leave the car for Fernando. Twenty minutes. Be downstairs.’

As I do so often, I pray to the gods, should I someday reach Miranda’s age, that I shall be like her.

Leaving things as Miranda has arranged them, I write a note to Fernando inviting him to join Ninuccia and Miranda and I at the mill at about one. I take a half-kilo pat of local butter and a stem of ginger from the fridge, and wrap them in a kitchen towel. From the spices in the armoire, I take a piece of cinnamon bark and a glass tube of Madagascar cloves, tuck everything into an old Dean & DeLuca canvas sack. I have a quick espresso at Bar Duomo, run the few metres to i Swizzeri to buy chocolate: 200 grams of Lindt, 99 per cent cacao, into the sack. Time for another espresso before the goddess of Buonrespiro sputters to a stop in front of San Giuseppi.

‘This is a good sign, I hope you realise that,’ she says.

Luminous this morning, her braids just done and pinned into an extra-high crown, Miranda wears a navy faille dress, which she usually saves for evening, and, I think, a delicate smudge of rouge across her cheekbones.

‘This is not a lack of trust on Ninuccia’s part. It’s curiousity. It’s …’

The bells of San Bartolomeo begin ringing high noon as we enter Castelpietro – the town entire sitting on a single curve of the road – and, by the time we’re already through the place, the bells have yet to get to nine. A few minutes later when we walk into the mill, Paolina and Gilda, Settimio (the mill caretaker), four men whom I’ve never seen before, Ninuccia and at least five of her cousins are all busy at one thing or another: laying a cloth on the long wooden table, taking this morning’s loaves from their brown paper sacks, setting down platters of Settimio’s house-made salame, filling wine jugs, carrying a pasta-cauldron full of water, placing it on the flame, dragging in more olives, carrying out more boxes of two-litre and five-litre bottles of new oil. Two of the cousins are at the work of brushing down the she-ass and feeding her.

Greetings and small talk are cut short when Ninuccia says, ‘Okay, Chou, take over.’

I add my shawl and hat to the others already hanging by the door, wash my hands at the sink which must once have been a baptismal font. The challenge begins.

‘Let’s gather together everything I’ll need,’ I say.

Ninuccia moves a bowl of dried pasta closer to the stove.

Tre kili di penne rigate,’ she tells me, arms crossed upon her chest.

Nearly seven pounds of penne. Seven pounds. It’s only then that I understand that Ninuccia’s aformentioned intimate lunch among three or four of us has grown into a festa for maybe twenty. Hence the enormous cauldron on the flame. ‘I’ll need sea salt, four litres of red, a pepper grinder, a mortar and pestle. I’ve brought the … the other things I’ll need.’ I’m not yet ready to speak of cloves and ginger and chocolate. I am less ready to speak of butter here in the birthing room of Umbria’s finest oil.

‘I’m right behind you, Chou. Give me a job.’ This is Gilda.

Having found the mortar and pestle with Settimio’s help, Paolina brings it to me.

‘Allora, Paolina, fifteen cloves pounded with this piece of cinnamon bark,’ I tell her, taking the spices from my sack. Paolina sets to work and several of the others, already mystified, gather closer in.

‘Gilda, please peel this ginger, then chop and smash it to a paste.’

‘Questo é zenzero?’

‘That’s real ginger. What you call ginger in dialect is actually peperoncino.’

‘Non ho capito.’

I repeat, ‘Per voi, zenzero vuol dire peperoncino. For you, zenzero means peperoncino. Ginger, it’s called in English.’ Miranda rescues. ‘Geen-jer. A pretty word. Geen-jer,’ she repeats and some of the others take up the chant. One of the cousins tells the she-ass about geen-jer.

‘L’acqua bolle,’ shouts Ninuccia and, after heaving in four good fistsful of coarse sea salt, I throw in the pasta, stir it with a metre-long olivewood spoon.

Gilda brings a ricketty metal stool over to the stove and tells me ‘You’re too small to work with that monster of a pot.’

‘Three minutes. Only three minutes, Ninuccia, and then drain it,’ I tell her.

‘I? You drain it.’ She knows I won’t be able to lift that cauldron by myself but Paolina is right there.

‘I’ll watch the time, and in exactly two and a half minutes, Gilda and I will drain it.’

I pour three litres of red into a pot and heat it over a low flame. In a smaller pot, I heat another litre of red and, girding myself for scorn, add half the butter I’ve brought, about 250 grams. No one comments. No one, at least not close enough so that I hear. I ask Miranda to grind pepper with a heavy hand into the butter-wine mixture, to keep the flame only high enough to melt the butter.

‘I must have a pan large enough in which to toss all the pasta,’ I say perhaps a bit too loudly.

I’m assured there isn’t such a thing there and so I’ll use the cauldron again, once the pasta is drained. Now everyone but the she-ass has gathered in. The unabashed scrutiny both rattles and exhilarates me.

Without my asking them to, Paolina and Gilda drain the pasta at the three-minute mark, leaving it slightly wet, just as it should be. I take up the empty cauldron, add the litre of oil, the other half of the butter and set it on a medium flame.

‘I’ll need the ginger now … and the pounded cinnamon and cloves.’

‘Geen-jer pronto.’ Gilda brings the ginger on the blade of her knife and Paolina hands me the mortar. I scrape in the ginger and dump the spices into the hot fats, let the mass warm and send up opulent, spicy steam. People begin to sniff, to move closer yet to the stove. Into the cauldron then with the barely cooked pasta. With the olivewood spoon, I begin rolling the pasta about in the perfumed fats. In my mind, I thank Gilda for thinking of the stool. My arm aches as I try to get to the bottom of the seven pounds of pasta. Dig, turn, dig, turn. I switch hands but my right one is too weak and so take the spoon back into my left, supporting it at the elbow with my right. I raise the flame then, allow the pasta to take on some colour, some crust. I move it all again, leave it to colour a bit more. Now, two large ladlesful at a time, I begin dosing the pasta with the three litres of warmed wine. I can tell even now that I’ll need at least another litre. Paolina is close enough for me to ask her to pour more wine into the pot so it will warm with what’s already there. As the pasta drinks in the wine, I add more. Ninuccia has handed out tumblers and Miranda has gone around with the wine pitchers. The pasta drinks, the crowd drinks and takes turns tearing at the loaves on the table. They plunder Settimio’s salame. Fernando arrives and gets to the work of heating the dishes by the fire before bringing them, stacked and warmed, to the table near the stove.

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ he says, massaging my shoulders. ‘Good thing about your shoes,’ he says close to my ear.

‘What about them?’

‘The heels. Can’t be much over ten centimetres. Perfect for a stint on a stool at the stove in an olive mill.’

Turning to him, I try for a glare but begin to laugh, and take time to kiss the tips of my fingers, flinging them toward Paolina and Gilda who stand guard nearby. I turn back to the dosing of the pasta until it reaches the desired still-toothy texture, add the litre of wine, which I’d warmed with butter and pepper. I call for another large wooden spoon and with both in my hands I begin to toss and toss, glossing every piece of pasta, which, by now, has taken on the colour of old Bordeaux – amaranthine with a golden rim. I know why Paolina and Gilda don’t offer to spell me in this last step of the process.

‘A tavola, a tavola. To the table, to the table,’ Miranda claps her hands and it’s Ninuccia and Gilda who hold out the deep warmed plates into which I ladle the pasta – twenty-two plates to be precise. It’s Paolina who carries the plates to the table, four at a time, two plates resting on each of her inner arms. As she takes the last four plates, I take a small, sharp knife from a drawer, unwrap my 99 per cent chocolate and, one by one, I stop by each place, shaving the chocolate over the hot, hot pasta so that it melts on contact. I think most of the people don’t know it’s chocolate but perhaps some strange truffle or a sort of exotic cheese. Miranda sees what I’m doing, asks Settimio for his clasp-knife and, cracking off a large piece of the chocolate in my hand for herself, begins on the other side of the table. Finally Miranda and I sit in front of our own plates, she shaving chocolate over mine, I over hers. No one speaks. The soft noises of slurping, chomping, of grinding mandibles and clacking dentures fill the room. Then a voice.

‘E favolosa, questa pasta.’ I don’t know the name of this man who names the pasta fabulous, still I want to kiss him. Instead, Miranda gets up, does just that. They are asking for more but there is none. I drink deeply of my wine, watch Ninuccia watching me.

Sated, everyone seems content to sit a while. Very softly then, as though only to herself, Ninuccia begins to sing. Not sing, really, but chant in what must be the minor-key wail of the women in the mountains. Never before have I heard these sounds from an Umbrian yet others join her, only two, maybe three. I try to echo the sounds Ninuccia makes. I realise this is what the others are also doing. Now there are more of us. Ninuccia always leading, her eyes closed, her voice grows stronger and so do ours. The men begin to sing. Fernando is singing and I’m singing and weeping and Miranda is weeping. I think to Cosima in her Thursday Night dress: shimmering like gold when she moved in it … to her tribe chanting and keening, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

Ninuccia’s voice goes silent and the others, perhaps a note or two later, quieten, too. I feel Ninuccia looking at me again and raise my head to see it’s so. What is it in those great grey eyes? She knows I’ve been thinking of Cosima. Is there also some small apology in that gaze? For having set me up for this impromptu lunch for two to which she’d invited twenty? A test?

Still no one has moved from the table. Communion has been taken but the mass has not ended. Why have they sung someone else’s song, these Umbrians who are mostly very old? As though water and mountains and time have never separated one tribe from another.

It’s Settimio who speaks first. ‘That … that song with no words, it was the one my mother sang to us. Four of us. One bed, my mother rocking in her chair, I swear it was that song she sang.’

A murmur of compliance. An aunt, a mother, another mother, also they sang that song. It can’t be so, not that very song, and yet Ninuccia’s voice has comforted them as did long-ago voices raised in the melancholoy of a lullabye, a night song, a sonata in B flat minor. In the mountains, in Cosima’s mountains, the chanting was another kind of comfort, the sound of the tribe’s own angelus signalling rebellion. A prelude to vendetta.

‘Shall we make a pact, here and now? Every year when the wine and the oil are new, we’ll meet at this same table for this same meal?’ This is Ninuccia.

Miranda looks at me and I know she is telling me, Do you understand? This is how it happens … The way rituals are born. As Fernando said I was, Miranda is also telling me, you are of us.

One of Ninuccia’s cousins, a woman with the same Titian hair as hers, asks the man who sits across from her, ‘Enrico, didn’t you like the pasta? Why aren’t you happy?’

‘Certo, certo, certainly I liked it. And of course I’m happy.’

‘Then why aren’t you crying?’