IT IS LATE IN OCTOBER OF 2006, TWO YEARS AFTER Miranda’s fraudulently professed withdrawal from Thursday Night cooking. Not only has Miranda been constantly at the Thursday burners, but all four of we others have been there with her. Ten-handed Ravel we’ve been playing. We spar and tiff, we quarrel and laugh and sometimes we sing.
Having chipped at icons early on in our sessions together, we began to allow nostalgia a grander role in what we cooked, honouring traditions but divining them down to more familial ways. One of the women might say, ‘I know that agnello stufato, braised lamb, is made without tomatoes but my grandmother used tomatoes. Let’s use tomatoes.’ And so we used tomatoes with the lamb or beat up a frying batter with white wine rather than beer or left a suckling lamb to braise overnight in nothing but butter and sea salt in a terracotta pot – its lid sealed shut with a paste of flour and water – in the waning heat of the wood oven. We began to expand the Thursday Night repertoire of dishes and stories by retreating even farther back into the women’s individual and collective pasts. I’ve always thought it was Miranda’s brandy-drenched boar that emboldened them.
As for their resistance to l’Americana, it abides. As I knew it would. That long-ago day at the mill, my standing on a stool to stir three kilos of wine-plumped pasta in that witch’s cauldron, shifted me into their folkloric history if not their unguarded confidence about things culinary. Trust in that camp having never been the animus of my desire to be among them, I am not troubled by the continuing absence of it. It is only Ninuccia’s sometimes acidic expressions of resistance – as much to me as to how I think and work with food – that burn. Pazienza. Patience.
I have learned to quench all reference to the gastronomy of France, my own first and eternal love. All Gallic regions and their glories are begrudged; carrots, onions and celery sautéed in butter – butter, by now, a pardoned sacrilege – I call soffrito, never breathing, mirepoix. If I crust beef in the fat from crisped pancetta with shallots and wild thyme, braise it in red wine, add the dried zest of an orange and Niçoise olives – the olives contraband along with wines and cheeses, Armagnac and Alsatian framboise carried home from visits over the border into the territory of the profane – I say da medioevo, from the medieval, and they are appeased as they would never be should I have called it what it is: a little stew from Provence.
Far more than the small French dalliances that I have enacted upon them have they enriched me. From study and research and observation during my journalist life, I’d learned of Umbria’s culinary traditions, mine a scholarly knowledge, only somewhat fortified, tested in my early Orvieto years by listening to Miranda, chopping and stirring for her. Never once in these two years having written a recipe or even a method, the women talk to me, show me as did their mothers and grandmothers to them. Or, in Miranda’s case, as did the ancient and revered cook to the noble family for whom she began to work when she was sixteen. When they battle among themselves about which reading of a dish is the authentic one, I step aside. I follow the consensus.
The composition of Thursday suppers they have, for all this time, left to me. I write the menus and all of us cook. They have grown to like and expect the filo conduttore approach to all the parts of a supper, the conducting thread technique in which Miranda believed but often failed to execute. I can do it well, string the dishes together – antipasto through dolce – with the barely discernable, subtle, or bold use of a single herb, a spice, a fruit, the dishes building in intensity as wines should, were we ever to drink any but our own local red. This I do while respecting their rules and that pleases them. It has sometimes become their game at table to identify the supper’s filo conduttore.
And when I cook a dish alone and perpetrate some exotic fillip, they accept it as a specimen from the old tomes. Or pretend to. By now Filiberto has begun to say, at first taste, da medioevo, thus avoiding further comment from the tribe. Still, when I work at the dishes that belong to them, they watch me, if with a guise of nonchalance. No matter how long I stay, I will always be just passing through.
We grow and forage and barter just as Miranda had always done. We save bits and pieces of one supper and build upon them for the next. Our needs having outgrown the garden outside the rustico – a plot too sheltered by a stand of old oaks – a half hectare of fine black earth we’ve rented from a farmer outside Porano, the village that sits, as the crow flies, two kilometres across a valley from Orvieto. We have planted an orto on this land, which we and our men tend and harvest. And it’s there, right at the edge of the orto, where, sometimes in late spring and summer and into early autumn, we set up for Thursday suppers. Everyone who has an auto carts up to the site one or two tables from the rustico, a bench or some excuse for a chair. And our bread and wine. We shell just-picked peas or marbled red beans or skinned favas directly into a pot of water boiling upon a tripod fire and roast sausages and bulbs of fennel or tiny eggplant or just-dug baby onions or fat bull’s-eye tomatoes over the white-hot ash of another fire, which Filiberto has set in a pit he’d dug and lined with river stones.
As the light pales to lilac, we begin pouring out one another’s wine, take up our chairs and turn them to the improbable beauty of the town, which has sat upon its great volcanic plateau since Iron Age Villanovan tribes settled there a thousand years before Christ. Barely breathing, no one speaks. Perched on the edge of her chair, inclining herself toward the sun, her hands flat upon her aproned thighs, Miranda closes her eyes. All the better to feel the light. She waits. A low-slung breeze thrums the sheets of metal that protect the woodpile behind us, makes a wind harp of them, and she waits half a beat longer, taunting Apollo, her eyes wide open now, goading him on his way through reddish clouds thin as tulle. And then she whispers, ‘Ecco la torta, behold the cake.’
Ornamented, bejewelled, its scars and sins blurred, Orvieto at sunset is a glittering wedding cake awaiting a bride, the long train of her silver-mesh dress scraping across the old stones. Gold-rose gleams splash upon the gothic face of the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, dazzling the red-roofed palazzi that enfold her, lighting up the meadows flung out over the green silk valley below the town, spangling wild iris tangled in the high grasses and yellow corn strutting across the fields. And the vines, everywhere the vines.
The torches we’ve pummelled into the earth we light now, take our places at the strange many-clothed, many-levelled table, take one another’s hand, the breeze trembling the flames of the torches, making the wind harp moan. We say, ‘Vivi per sempre. Live forever.’
Unlike Thursdays in the rustico where the dishes are brought out one by one, here we take our supper as we will, all the pans and bowls within reach upon the table. Helping one another to each thing, one tears at the bread, passes the piece to the one nearest, then passes on the loaf so that the next one can do the same. Tear, pass, pass.
Tourists who drive by on the road to and from Porano often stop, sometimes to a screeching halt. Tumbling out of their autos, cameras at the ready, they fix the scene as they would a monument, a vista. Standing in a row gaping at what must seem a spectral pageant, they say nothing. Nor, often, do we. When Italians, local or not, stop to look, they shout from their windows, ‘Siete pronti per un macchiaiolo or siete proprio Felliniani. You are ready to be painted. You are Fellini characters.’ If one of Miranda’s truckers passes by, he whistles, takes both hands off the steering wheel, blows kisses to her, yells ‘Amore mio’ into the darkening.
Stars and moon and the light of the torches rouse discourse at the table by the orto unlike the one under the slouching beams of the rustico. Out here our talk tends to mystery.
‘Voi credete nel malocchio? Do you believe in the evil eye?’ This is Ninuccia, her enquiry meant for all of us.
‘Not at all,’ Filiberto answers her.
‘Nor do I,’ says Iacovo, standing up to take a turn pouring our wine. ‘But it’s power is absolute.’
‘It does not exist but it’s power is absolute. Both are true. What is not made of at least two truths?’ Adjusting her braids, Miranda looks around the table. One hunger sated, now she has appetite for provocation.
‘Have you been victim of the evil eye?’ This is Paolina asking Miranda.
But Ninuccia, Pierangelo and Iacovo speak at once and so Miranda does not answer Paolina, waits while the three tell of instances, undisputed they say, of tragedies caused by the power of the evil eye. Injuries, reverses of fortune, malaise, unexplained deaths, a well gone dry in a biblical rainstorm. Ninuccia is naming upon her fingers the races in which some form of the evil eye is believed, practised, respected: Greeks, Arabs, Spaniards, Jews, Russians, Turks among them. Save Miranda, Paolina, Fernando and I, the others have joined in to agree or dispute. Paolina tries repeatedly to be heard but it’s only when Miranda calls forcefully for santa calma, holy calm, that the others turn to her and wait for her to speak.
‘How many of you wear or carry the little horn?’ Paolina asks, pulling a chain out from under her black T-shirt as she speaks. A tiny gold horn hangs from it. Amulets in the shape of a horn are believed to stave off the evil eye.
Pierangelo takes a five centimetre-long red ceramic horn from his pocket and lays it on the table. Reaching under her sweater into the space between her breasts, Ninuccia pulls out her own red horn and holds it in her open palm. Miranda works her hand to the same place on her own body and holds up a tiny golden ring encircled with six horns. One by one, everyone owns up. Only Fernando and I are wandering through life without protection from the evil eye.
Everyone laughs at Paolina’s cunning, some saying that carrying the horn is tradition more than belief, others likening it to wearing a crucifix or a blessed medal. The horn and a crucifix together, a double buttress. Paolina insists that some seminary students she once knew carried horns in the pockets of their soutanes. Filiberto says that old Don Piervito still does. Even those insisting that the evil eye does not exist say, ‘Why take a chance?’
‘Miranda, have you been the object of malocchio?’ Once again, this is Paolina.
‘My darling girl, I don’t think I really know. I carry the horns because my mother did and, I suppose, everyone I’ve ever known did, does. I have never felt menaced by a person or an event. Certainly not by something that felt like stregoneria, witchcraft. Destiny has had her way with me but that’s another thing. Or is it?’
‘I think there is only destiny.’ I say this more to myself than to the others.
‘Witchcraft is primordial. Witches who harm, witches who heal,’ says Pierangelo, son of the south, son of Cosima.
‘Very little call for witches these days, white or black, at least as far as I know,’ Miranda tells him.
‘The call is still very much present. Secrecy, covertness more finely honed. How appalled you would be, Miranda …’ Pierangelo goes quiet, picks up his amulet, holds it in his hand for a moment, returns it to his pocket.
‘Are we talking about the devil?’ This is the first time that Fernando speaks.
‘Does such a force exist?’ Miranda asks, looking up and around the table.
‘I don’t think we’ve established that, but …’ Filiberto says before Paolina speaks over him.
‘Are we all part devil? I mean, isn’t there some impulse to vendetta lurking in each of us? Even the most innocent sort? If there is an innocent sort …’
‘I think we’ve shifted now from vendetta to pure fiendishness. The evil eye and the devil are not related,’ says Fernando.
‘So you are all in accord: il diavolo exists,’ Miranda says, the barest hint of question in the last three words.
‘Miranda, not even of you could I believe such ingenuousness? Think back to the gods and their various authorities, savage and benign …’ Pierangelo is prepared to proceed but an imperious Miranda flutters the back of her hand in dismissal.
‘Mythology.’
‘Yes, myth … myth drawn from reality. From the forces of nature but also from human actions witnessed, lived …’ Pierangelo tries again. ‘Maybe those who have more lately practised depravity will someday be relegated to myth. A god called Hitler in league with the one called Lucifer …’ Filiberto is bent on taking us back to less incendiary ground. The others mutter, feud sotto voce until there is quiet again.
Without deciding I will, I say aloud what I’m thinking. ‘Destiny. Rife with charm and cruelty, if in unequal portions, there is only destiny. It’s another word for God, for fate. Maybe it’s another word for devil. The stones are thrown before we hit the light and what we do with the choices we’re allowed, now and then, might cause destiny to rethrow a stone or two. Apart from that …’
‘Chou, sei noiosa stasera, you are annoying this evening,’ Miranda tells me in the tone of a weary mother. ‘Why do you insist on piling every human mystery into destiny’s arms? Try this one. Was Jesus God, incarnate?’
Sotto voce murmurings begin again.
‘I don’t know. I know He existed, that He wandered the earth, spoke of sublime ethics, which must have been the last thoughts on the minds of the Romans and even the Jews, ethics that most of us have yet to pursue. Was he the son of God? I don’t know. How could I know that when I don’t know who is God? Jesus is a figure I can conceive. God is … less substantial in my mind.’
‘Less substantial, yes, of course, so why not just add Him to Destiny’s already heavy load?’ Miranda shakes me between her teeth and I lose my way. I look at her but she doesn’t look at me. The wind harp whines.
‘Nor do I know who Jesus was,’ she says, the despot in her spent. ‘Maybe he was the son of the Hebrew God who created the universe, the God who has always been and will always be, whether or not He be substantial in our minds. Maybe Jesus was just a lovely Jewish boy, born of a mother prone to visions. Maybe the Nazarene carpenter – humble, submissive – absolved the beautiful Maria of her annunciation story and married her anyway. Loved her baby boy as his own.’ As she says this, she turns to me, gently sets me down, almost unharmed.
‘A universal God, his son, the prophets, the teachers, the miracle workers, witches, the devil, all of them newcomers if one thinks to the legions of dieties who managed us in antiquity. A god for every need. A goddess. Far fewer unanswerable questions back then. We knew what was what, who was who, where to go and what to do, what would happen should we stray,’ Paolina says.
‘Back to mythology, is it? I thought you’d lived long enough among the Jesuits to …’ Miranda girds for one more round but Paolina is faster.
‘Miranda, everything we think we know may well be myth.’
‘Già. Indeed.’ Miranda consents.
‘I Moirai, the Fates, they were at work even before the gods,’ Ninuccia says and she – along with Paolina – begins to tell the story, the two spelling one another, line after line.
‘Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.’
‘To gods and mortals, they give each one a portion of good and evil.’
‘Clotho spins the thread of life.’
‘Lachesis decides the length of the thread.’
‘It’s Atropos who cuts the thread.’
I love this myth and want a part in its telling but gather the sense to stay silent. Conjuring them as grisly ancients, hearing the story of the goddesses frightened me more than any gory fairytale when I was six or maybe seven; Clotho bending over her wheel spinning life-threads, Lachesis scrutinising a just-birthed baby, awarding it the length of it’s life-thread, and the dread Atropos brandishing scissors like a battle axe. Herself a grisly ancient, it was a Sister called Odile who instructed us in Mythology and it was only after she’d read to us of the goddesses that she passed about a print of three diaphanously-upholstered seraphs, explaining that mythology was story-telling rather than truth, that we need only be good girls, good little convent girls.
‘You use the present tense,’ Miranda notes, her gaze shifting from Ninuccia to Paolina. ‘Who’s to say they’re not still at their jobs?’ I ask her.
‘Which brings us neatly back to destiny,’ she says, smiling and saying l’Americana just above a whisper. ‘I’m not sure if it’s the smoking torches or the beauty of all this, the goodness of our sitting up here under the stars and beside our pretty beans winding up those stakes. No, I’m not sure if it’s smoke or beauty that’s stinging my eyes, causing me to weep a little and my heart to break. I’d like to think that if Jesus happened upon us just now, we’d make room for him at the table. He’d rest a while with us, I suspect, he still loving bread and wine as he once did. In any case, shall we drink to the dullness of Atropos’s scissors?’
•
It is the last Thursday in this October. Fernando has left me here at the rustico while he heads to San Casciano to hunt galletti, wild mushrooms, with old friends from our life there, Stefania and Marco. It was Stefania who telephoned last evening, predicting a night of soft rain and saying, ‘Let’s hunt wild mushrooms tomorrow morning.’
Some seasons rare others profuse, i galletti – little hens – are chanterelle in France. I tell Stefania that I won’t be able to come but Fernando promises to be there by seven.
‘It will be too late. Come to sleep here and we can begin at sunrise,’ she cajoles, reminds me it’s been weeks since we’ve visited, promises Marco’s luscious galetti sauce for the pici, thick ropes of pasta that he and Grazia, one of their cooks, will roll one by one. I love my friends, I love galetti, I love Marco’s cooking but nothing, no one, seduces me from Thursday Nights.
Since we have only one auto, Fernando will leave me at the rustico on his way to San Casciano, hours in advance of my usual time to begin cooking.
‘They’ll have been in the woods for hours by the time you arrive,’ I tell Fernando as we drive up to the rustico. He’d asked Stefania to wake us at five and, though she did, we chose to stay longer in bed.
‘I know where to find them,’ he tells me.
‘I know, too. In the bar, sipping grappa and telling galetti stories.’
‘More likely they’ll have taken a flask with them. I’ll stay for lunch but I’ll be back here long before supper. With two kilos of galetti for the tribe.’
‘Such a greedy forager. Half a kilo would do.’
I watch him manoeuvre the old BMW back onto the Montefiescone road and almost begin to wave him back. I’ve never been alone in the rustico for more than an hour or so but this morning the tiny woodsmoked refuge is all mine. I open the never-locked door, touch things here and there as I walk through, crouch to shovel ashes from the hearth, push aside the bedsheet curtain, carry the full pail out to the ash barrel behind the rustico. On the work table Miranda has made a still-life of the elements of supper: masses of gnarled rosemary branches; long, leafy arms of wine grapes freshly cut from the vines; a great pyramid of green and black figs layered with their leaves; a sack of red and brown-skinned pears; and paper packets and tiny cloth bags of spices. A haunch of her home-cured prosciutto hangs above the table and a demijohn of new wine sits by the door.
Only Paolina and I will be cooking for tonight, others still involved in some stage of the vendemmia, the harvesting of the grapes. Fernando and I have been cutting grapes these last six mornings with Ninuccia and Pierangelo and their small army of workers, while Miranda and neighbouring farm wives went about the task of feeding all of us. Miranda will be there with them again today. Perhaps Gilda will decide to join Paolina and I. One never knows about Gilda.
I don’t expect Paolina until eleven or so. I look about for something to do, take up cloths and set about cleaning the already clean tables and benches and chairs. A futile task, I sweep the floor, still a mosaic of broken, half-sunken terracotta tiles, scraps of linoleum, lengths of wood fitted in here and there like puzzle pieces. That famous truckload of antique tiles with which Miranda’s nephews were, two years ago, to have laid a new floor in the rustico, they sold at a grandiose price to an outlander whose villa they were restructuring. Thanks to the nephews, though, the beams slouch less and in places where the stones of the walls had shifted, they’ve stuccoed, and washed the patches with a sponge in a tint more rose than apricot.
Miranda conceded to a length of ruined water-green brocade, which Paolina, Gilda and I found on the Neopolitan’s used-clothing table in the market one Saturday. Gilda clutched the stuff, burnt to crumbling rags along its hem, against her chest: ‘An enraged man must have heaved a lit candelabra across the room, smashing the window, setting afire the curtains while a woman screamed and wept. We have to have this.’
When Paolina asked its price, the Neopolitan gently took it from Gilda, folded it carefully as he would the shroud of Turin. ‘I think you must be right. About the man and the candelabra and the woman. I’m sure of it,’ he told her, handing it to her with his compliments.
An Umbrian merchant would never have fallen so utterly for Gilda’s figment. Neopolitans, as intrinsically susceptible to romance as they are to villainy, might well have lifted her purse with one hand while offering the brocade with the other. The piece falls now from the iron hook where we once hung herbs to dry, and is draped over the top and down one side of the single window, as though it’s always been there.
I feel at odds with this uncommon, undesigned time. I walk about, look again at the work table, adjust things that don’t need adjusting. I go outside, open the bread oven, give it a good sweeping, take logs from Iacovo’s wood pile, place them in a square, add kindling on top, another layer of wood, more kindling, a third layer of wood, more kindling in the centre. I light a faggot of twigs and throw them, flaming, into the centre of the square. A single match does it. No bellows, no fanning. I pull the iron door almost closed, and go back inside to get the woodstove started. A surprise for Paolina, I will make a small batch of tortucce for our lunch. No room on the work table, I take up the oilcloth on the supper table, scoop out flour straight onto the scrubbed wood, build up the sides to make a well, pour in yeast softened in warmed white wine, sea salt, a piece of butter from my private stash in the cheese hut, a few drops of oil, crushed fennel seeds. The mass feels good under my hands and I knead it with a rhythmic thud. Waves slapping on sand. Miranda says kneading bread is like a Gregorian chant, both taking on the cadence of the kneader’s or chanter’s heartbeat. I desire to believe this, so I do. Into a bowl, covered with a kitchen towel, I set the dough on a chair pulled close to the warming stove. I pour oil into a pot but won’t begin to warm it until Paolina is here.
I go out to the sheepfold wall where I’ve left my sack, pull out a hard folder papered in a scene from Benozzo Gozzoli, take it back inside and, onto the place I scrubbed after mixing the dough, I dump out sundry sizes and types of paper held together in a corner by the two-tears-and-a-fold method. I will work. The book about Tuscany already published, the finished narrative recounting our early days in Orvieto well into the production process, it’s a Sicilian story that I shall work on now, the events of three weeks spent in the mountains there during the first summer of our marriage while we were still living in Venice. Scarce useful material in the fat pile, words and half sentences scribbled mostly on bar napkins and ripped-off edges of the thick brown paper of caffè-table covers and fancy pastry-box wrappings. Never having ceased to relive them, I hardly need notes to restore me to those days. To those people. For these past twelve years since that summer, I’ve never stopped writing the story, jealously guarding it in its own separate cache in my mind, all the while working on other books. I pick up the pieces, stuff them back into the folder, knowing that all I really need now is time to let the story write itself. How strange to think that what has been part of me for so long – faces and voices and words, neroli riding every breeze, the crisp just-fried shell of a cannolo under my teeth, the cut of one woman’s eyes, the scent of lavender in still-wet hair, the stomp of horses’ hooves below my window at sunrise – all of it to become pages in a book. We all die a little when something finishes. It’s how we use up our time. How we use up the thread that Lachesis bequeathes us. Beautiful or painful, we die a little from every ending.
I place two chairs face to face in front of the spent hearth, sit, stretch my legs out straight as the space will allow. This won’t do. There’s just enough wood in the hearth basket to make a fire. My third fire of the morning, I feel a primeval rush watching the flames take hold and crackle with the first match. I look at my strong, small hands, which are older than I am, my nails hard and short and filed square. How many hundreds of years ago was it? The era of my silk-wrapped California nails. I make a pillow of my jacket, lie on the least rugged space of the floor and I sleep.
An auto careening off the Montefiescone road onto the gravel outside wakes me. Paolina.
‘Mi dispiace tanto, I’m so sorry you’ve been waiting … I was with the Dutch in Bolsena …’
Having flung open the door before she’d come to a full stop, Paolina shouts her apology, exits from her old black Mini, legs first; a long stretch of skinny jeans before her black mud-caked boots crunch down on the stones. Unfolding the rest of her to reveal her signature black T-shirt, a pashmina – also black – hanging from one shoulder, a canvas sack hung from the other. We embrace and I smell sun and olive oil and woodsmoke on her skin. As is mine today, Paolina’s hair is unbound and we laugh at the similarities of our long, curly manes. Leaning back a bit, she spreads her fingers and runs them through my tangles, tells me, ‘Yours is worse than mine. I left my clip in Bolsena. What’s your excuse?’
‘Don’t have one. I’ll get some elastics from my purse.’
Piling up our hair, washing our hands, our alliance is easy. Over these past two years, Paolina and I and Miranda have been the Thursday constants, with Gilda and Ninuccia joining us often enough. We walk about the work table and I watch Paolina tenderly touching things, standing back to look at the whole, then moving closer again. She has grown up and spent all her life among this bounty, and still the beauty of it amazes her. To be able to be amazed by the familiar is the one incontestable gift that we five women share. So has pronounced Miranda over and over again.
‘I’d rather paint this than cook it,’ she says.
‘We can save pieces of everything and lay the supper table just like this one.’
‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. I’m starving, always starving after I finish a lesson.’
She begins to unpack her sack. She looks up at me, starts to say something but stops, turns the words into a smile. Paolina seems otherwise engrossed today, gentle, sweet but far away. Secretive. Happily so. I will not ask what causes this other spirit. She will tell me if she chooses.
‘What did you manage to teach your two Dutchmen this morning?’ I ask her, lighting the flame under the oil. She looks at me as I do this and yet doesn’t seem to see me or the pot or the flame beneath it.
She says, ‘We’re still at the beginning – fresh pasta and potato gnocchi. They always want to make the same things and so that’s what we do. Sono pignoli. They are perfectionists. We used thirty-six eggs this morning since they’re expecting twenty-two for dinner. I warned them I wouldn’t be back to serve or wash up. Siete per conto vostro, you’re on your own, I told them.’
Paolina is a cooking teacher whose students are mostly German and Dutch tourists who rent the same countryside villas near the lake of Bolsena year after year. She is legendary among them and I sense it’s the wistful beauty of her as much as her talent that intrigues them. Paolina is docile by nature, shy, hesitant, yet what she says is often pungente, piercing. Though one wouldn’t flinch to hear that she was ten years younger, Paolina is sixty.
‘I made dough to fry. For our lunch,’ I tell her. ‘A few tortucce, a sliver of prosciutto, some wine.’
‘Perfect. But first a pair of bruschette. An Umbrian woman must have her bruschette …’
From the half loaf she’s carried in her sack, she cuts four thin slices, shakes the ash from the grate and sets the bread over the fire.
‘Bread before bread?’
‘Why not?’
‘And there will be two more breads at supper tonight.’
‘Lovely.’
Atkins rolling about in his tomb flashes in my mind. As do our guests, mostly those from America, whose organisms rebel at wheat, all glutenous foods. The culprits are pesticides. Good clean wheat nourished most of the world for millenia. Here the greatest compliment one person can pay another is to say, lei e buono come pane, she’s good as bread. Even the word companion, when divined down from the Latin, signifies the one with whom I take my bread. So, yes, bread before bread. As long as it’s made from honest, unmanipulated wheat.
I watch Paolina slitting the skins of two figs from the pile on the work table then spreading the red flesh of them onto the hot bread. She drizzles on some oil, a few turns of the pepper mill. Beckoning me to the fire, she is arranging the four beautiful bruschette on the tin that Miranda uses to catch drippings from meat as it cooks over the embers.
‘You know, Miranda never cleans this old tin. Just swipes it with a piece of soft bread and …’
‘I know. And, if you’re anywhere near, she tears the bread in half and …’
‘Ah, so you do know. It must be suffused with twenty years’ worth of flavours from herbs and flesh and wood and I always use it when I come here, even if it’s only – like today – as a tray. Here, rub the bruschetta across the bottom of the tin before you take it.’
I go to see about the oil, pinch off a tiny piece of dough, drop it into the pot and watch as it turns deep gold in a few seconds. Ready. I stretch to thinness two small nuggets of dough and slip them into the hot oil. Immediately they blister, begin dancing about. ‘Paolina, will you slice the prosciutto?’
More proficient even than Miranda at the job, Paolina works a knife, saw fashion, across the haunch, lays the ruffles of almost transparent ham over the luscious hot little breads, letting it melt into them. We don’t bother with plates or even to sit but eat out of hand, taking time only to open the spigot on the wine barrel, to fill two tumblers. Now we are ready to begin.
We need workspace and so defile Miranda’s still-life, moving it in diminutive form to the supper table. Paolina holds a chair while I slip the crotch of a sheaf of grapes over a beam. We like the look of this and so hang three others in the same way so that the grape leaves nearly touch the table, as though we’d set up among the vines.
Stripping the pointy little rosemary leaves from their branches, chopping them with a rocking motion of her knife directly on the wooden work table, Paolina mixes the dough for fig schiacciate: flatbreads of yeast softened in warm red wine, flour, a little sugar, sea salt, oil. Working part of the rosemary into the dough, she sets it to rise beside the woodstove, then places the remaining rosemary in the hearth basket, scent for the fire during supper. Meanwhile I put together the dough for the wine bread, which wants a slow four-hour rise and so I carry it out to the coolness of the cheese hut. We talk about timing, calculate when the wine bread will go into and be ready to come out of the oven, agree that we won’t bake the schiacciate until after the pears are done. I stripe-peel and core some of both the brown and red-skinned ones, cut a thin slice from their bottoms, leave their stems intact and sit them to rest in a bath of red wine warmed with butter. Once the wine breads are baked, I’ll wrap a spiral of pancetta around the pears, slide them into the oven, roast them to softness but not to collapse and the pancetta to an almost-charred crispness. The red wine and buttery juice from the pears will have formed a fine sauce with which I’ll glaze them while they’re still hot.
The menu for tonight is simple, a good part of it already prepared. We’ll start with the roasted pears and a round of Filiberto’s new pecorino, still creamy after only a few weeks of aging. Then the schiacciate, Paolina’s rosemary-scented dough stretched flat, laid with halved figs still in their skins, more rosemary on top, a good dose of oil in the hollows formed by a final knuckling of the dough. The juices from the figs will caramelise in the oven’s fierce heat and, as we we did with the tortucce, we’ll lay the hot flatbreads with prosciutto. As the tribe is vanquishing those, harvest sausages will be already crisping over the hearth fire. Made of coarsely ground pork (three parts lean, one part fat) dried grapes from last year’s harvest saved precisely for this purpose, as well as new grapes, seeded and peeled, new red wine, wild fennel flowers, sea salt and coarse-ground pepper, I mixed it at home on Tuesday morning, left it for a day to age in the fridge. It was Mocetti, our faithful butcher, who stuffed the winey, grape-studded mass into casings, tying the fat rope with thick string at short intervals. Yesterday Fernando and I hung the sausages from hooks in the cheese hut. Another day for the flavours to mingle. Once roasted, we’ll sit the plump, juice-dripping things on a puree of potatoes cooked in red wine rather than water and pounded to smoothness with oil. We’ll pass the vendemmia bread hand to hand. In final praise to the harvest, our dolce will be a cake made with wine grapes, if in yet another form. It was Ninuccia who, earlier in the week, cooked four or five kilos of new grapes in a copper, tin-lined pot over embers for a day and a night, the fruit slowly, very slowly, giving up its juices then reabsorbing them to form a dense compost. Once filtered, the compost becomes il mosto, a precious condiment used in both sweet and savoury harvest dishes. Ninuccia handed me a litre jar of mosto a few days ago, instructing from across her shoulder as she was doing something else: ‘More sugar than flour, wine, no more than two eggs, salt and olive oil, 300 grams of mosto. It you make it tonight, it will be just right for Thursday.’ My first torta di mosto waits in Miranda’s armoire, safe under a yellow bowl. Yes, every single dish made with wine.
The rustico heady as a wine cellar, dough under our nails, flour everywhere on our clothes, our hair mostly unbound again, we are giddy girls playing house. Paolina says, ‘We’re dangerous together, you and I. We could let the bread burn while we dream. When we talk I feel soothed. And when we’re quiet, as we are today, I feel soothed. Does that make sense? Maybe that’s the wrong word. Perhaps it’s that I feel understood … revealed without my having to work at explaining.’
Remembering Ninuccia’s mosto, I think Paolina’s words are pure and dense as wine cooked to syrup. Silent as she is, an uncommon allegria flits about her this afternoon.
‘To understand and to be understood …’ I say.
‘Yes, yes. It’s exactly that. With Niccolò I have always had that’
Niccolò. Nearly every time that Paolina and I have cooked together, she has been accompanied by a man – bello come il sole, beautiful as the sun, Miranda says of him – the same man who accompanies her sometimes to Thursday Nights. An arresting figure in English tweeds and paisley foulards, he might be an aging actor come to live out his dotage in the countryside and yet he is a gentleman farmer. And, as it’s said here of people who love the table, he is una forchetta d’oro, a golden fork. He walks with a cane but also with a swagger, this Niccolò.
‘I was going to ask you why he didn’t come with you today …’
‘He’s up at Castello della Sala observing the harvest or surely he would be here, if only to tell us what we’re doing wrong. My darling Niccolò.’
Paolina touches her suddenly flushed face, and says something about the woodstove and the fire. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
We wander out into the afternoon. Under the ripe five o’clock sun, the air is as gold as Orvieto wine and we walk a while in the meadow. We sit then among the weeds on the edge of Miranda’s oliveto to face a long stand of slender young trees, their branches drooping nearly to the ground with still-green fruit, the leaves hissing, quivering like the silvered net skirts of a hundred ballerinas. From the pocket of her jeans, Paolina pulls out a small metal box fitted with tobacco, rolling papers and matches. Using her thigh as a workspace, she expertly rolls a thin cigarette, hands it to me, rolls another, lights mine with a tiny wooden match, which the Italians call svedesi. She lights her cigarette from mine and we lean back, each with an arm under her head, watching the trees and the light. We smoke the cigarettes halfway then snuff them on a stone. Paolina puts the dead ends into her metal box.
Looking up at the sky, she says, ‘I’m sixty, Chou, and last evening I had my first proposal of marriage.’
I look over at her but she keeps her gaze upward. I sit up, ask, ‘One of the Dutch?’
‘Not one of the Dutch.’
‘Not one of the Dutch,’ I repeat inanely.
‘I’m … I’m trying to tell you … He’s seventy-eight years old. He’s … he’s been my cavalier since I was …’
‘Niccolò?’
‘Himself.’
Seventy-eight. A Sean Connery seventy-eight, I say to myself; this Niccolò wants only a kilt and a burr. Miranda calls him un vecchio querce, an old oak. ‘So many males, but how few men,’ Miranda says whenever Niccolò is near.
I’m imagining Niccolò in a kilt while Paolina is saying, ‘I understand that there’s a practical side to his offer. I do not delude myself into thinking he’s been moved by … you know, by romantic notions. Long ago he named me executrix of his estate but I think, well, perhaps he thinks that my sons and I will be more protected if he and I marry. I think that’s it. A part of it.’
‘Surely not the all of it. Even given the multiple and sinuous interpretations of Italian law, he can arrange things as he pleases. Why do you think it’s so strange that he wants to marry you?’
‘If you knew Niccolò you would not ask that. I can’t tell this to Miranda, less to Ninuccia, maybe I could to Gilda. Not to my sons.’
To my sons. Paolina speaks often of her four sons but never of their father. If I’d thought about it at all over the years, I suppose I’d assumed she’d long been widowed or divorced. But she has just said, my first proposal …
‘Will you accept him?’
‘How archaic you are, Chou. Accept.’ She looks at me and smiles, looks away. ‘I truly don’t know. There is something of the ludicrous about the idea. Maybe of the ridiculous. But, well, if you knew about the past …’
An auto crunching on the gravel distracts us and we look to our left.
‘This will be Niccolò,’ Paolina says. ‘I knew he wouldn’t resist coming to check on us.’
‘Dove sei? Where are you?’ It’s Fernando who calls out.
‘In the oliveto,’ Paolina shouts. Was it disappointment flickering her eyes?
One of Stefania’s baskets piled in galetti riding on his arm, Fernando comes to offer us his treasure. We smell and touch and properly admire the flat-capped ochre-coloured beauties. My image of Niccolò in a kilt lingers. Back in the kitchen, it lingers while I wipe the galetti with a damp cloth, trim and slice them, then heave them into a pan with more butter than oil, the fats scented in garlic and parsley. It’s lingering still as I shake the pan, flipping the mushrooms rather than stirring them, rubbing flakes of sea salt over them, shaking and flipping with more constancy than is necessary. Now I work on hearing a voice with an Italianate burr. I add white wine, leave the galetti to their drinking. A last shake, a last fistful of gremolata – raw garlic and parsley – to refresh the soft buttery things. I cover the pan.
I understand that Paolina, had she wished to talk more to me of private things, would find a way for us to stay apart from Fernando. Rather she seems intent on his uninterrupted presence, even asking him if he would mind working on scraping and cleaning an old wooden shutter, which has leant against a wall in the cheese hut for as long as any of us can remember.
‘Because of the open slats, it would make a perfect cooling rack for bread,’ she tells him, going to fetch it, setting it outside the door.
All three of us work on the shutter and when it’s scraped and scrubbed, Paolina opens wide the kitchen window, and lays it over the sill. Later we set the breads to cool on it, the water-green brocade their frame. The washing up done, table set, sausages readied for the fire, I tell Paolina and Fernando that I will go home to bathe and change, leave what’s left to be done to them but Paolina, too, says she will go home for a bit. We both kiss Fernando, find our sacks. ‘Io raccomando,’ Paolina tells him, trying for Miranda’s goddess voice. ‘Take care of things.’
At first I think Paolina plans to come home with me so that we can talk but she settles herself in the Mini, waits for me to drive out first. ‘A più tardi’ is all she says.
•
Knowing I’ll only be a few minutes, I leave the auto, illegally, just down from Bar Duomo. Is that Gilda waving from a front row table?
‘I’ve been waitiing for you … I, I knew, I mean, you usually come home to change before …’ Whisky-coloured eyes peering out from under the brim of her fedora, Gilda looks tired.
‘Yes, yes, come up with me … Are you all right?’
‘Fine, fine, but … Nothing really, I … Could you please lend me twenty euros? It’s my foolish car, the gas guage never tells the truth and …’
‘Of course, but where is your car?
‘Just down the hill, in Sferracavallo. Outside the village. It gave out in a safe place, almost safe. I don’t know anyone down there, and, well, I thought I had a bill tucked away, actually I knew I didn’t have anything tucked away but …’
‘Gilli, it’s nothing, everybody runs out of gas. Come up with me. Relax while I get ready. There’s a gas can in the boot of my car, we’ll get it filled and …’
‘Would you mind paying for my espresso? I felt uncomfortable just sitting there without ordering anything.’
I call to Yari who is standing at the door to the bar, ‘Ciao bellissimo. Stai bene? Are you well? Gilli’s caffé is on my bill. A domani. Until tomorrow.’
Gilda and I race up the twenty-eight stairs to our apartment and, once inside, up the other two flights from the salone to the bedroom. I pull Fernando’s favourite of my winter dresses from the armoire and nudge Gilda aside from where she stands in front of my dresser mirror trying on hats. I take fresh lingerie, tell her it’s cognac in the tiny perfume bottle on the table near my bed, should she like a sip. She’s talking to me while I’m in the shower but her voice is only noise. I dress, turn my head upside down, comb my hair with my fingers. I can’t find the boots I want and then notice that Gilda is wearing them.
‘Look, they fit me perfectly. As I was saying before, don’t, please don’t tell Miranda about any of this.’
I find other boots, pull a grey wool basque down to my eyebrows. ‘Ready?’
‘You do promise, don’t you? About Miranda.’
‘Gilda, it’s hardly criminal to run out of gas, it’s … Why are you always so cautious of Miranda’s …’
Sitting on my bed, she takes off her fedora, sets my small black velvet hat with a veil in its place, this one revealing more of her hair. Of the palest ash brown lit with thick chunks of blonde and shorn just below her jaw, it caresses the sharp bones of her cheeks and chin. Her whisky gaze is almost always bemused, already engaged, as though all that Gilda can see lies on the other side of a window pane. She gets up, looks at herself in the mirror, adjusts the hat, pulls at the veil until it touches her cheeks, turns to me and says, ‘It’s only to deflect her angst. For Miranda, I have never grown up from the fifteen-year-old stray I was when she first saw me. I am the daughter she never had. And maybe she is the only mother I have ever really known. Perforce our connection is byzantine, made of entangled complications.’
‘That’s an oxymoron.’
‘Which is also byzantine.’
‘I see.’ I don’t see at all. ‘But still, running out of gas …’
‘But I’ve run out of money as well, I mean, not exactly run out of it but … There was this man, a boy really, maybe eighteen, maybe less. It was a market day, a Saturday. A few weeks ago. It was raining, that soft-hearted autumn rain, light but enduring. Well, he was standing on the corner of via del Duomo and the corso, you know, right in front of the bank. Paganini. Number Five. Of course he would be playing Number Five. A child-sized umbrella he’d rigged upon one shoulder to protect the violin and the side of his face, which caressed it while the rain fell freely on the other side. How he played, Chou. I couldn’t move, stood in the doorway to the pharmacy. No hat on the stones in front of him, no open violin case, he just played. As I said, it was a Saturday, the first one of the month. The day when Bernandino pays me, usually in five one-hundred-euro bills. That morning he’d given me one of those purple ones. At first I didn’t know what it was. A five-hundred-euro note, I’d never seen one before. It was there in my jacket pocket. Without taking it out, I folded it twice, made it very small, walked over to the boy, and slipped it into his pocket, on the dry side of his jacket. I kissed the wet side of his face and then I ran. I’ve managed wonderfully through the month. I mean, what do I need of money when you really think about it? I have no rent to pay, I lunch with the other staff at Bernandino every day, I have my garden, my faithful Miranda and her baskets. Iacovo brings me wood, he’s always brought me wood …’
I don’t tell her that it’s been years since Fernando has consented to my carrying about our money for the day since, no matter how much or how little the sum, it would always be gone before the day was. So many musicians, singers, Nigerian boys selling socks. And what about the kids who work in the caffés and are never tipped save by strangers, mostly American. I don’t tell her any of that, though I envy her having had that five-hundred-euro note to give away. There is something I can tell her, though.
‘My son was born to Paganini’s Fifth. On my little tape player. Itzhak Perlman. I wish I’d been with you that day in the rain. I wish you’d been with me when Erich was born.’
Sitting on the bed in the little black hat, she stays quiet for a long time. Until the memory that plays behind the whisky eyes is finished.
‘Never tell this to Miranda. Never,’ she says.
‘Never.’
‘I’ll be paid on Saturday and so …’
‘You might tell Bernandino that you prefer smaller bills. Just in case.’
In less than twenty minutes of our racing here and there, Gilda’s auto roars to life.
‘Will you wait here, let me get a head start? If we arrive at the same time, she’ll know something’s amiss. Please.’ Still wearing the hat with the veil, though I don’t think she is aware of it, she hugs me. And while I wait on the curve of Sferracavallo, I think of my son who was born to Paganini, his great dark eyes wide open as though he’d been listening.
I arrive at the rustico just before nine to find some of the tribe standing near or sitting on the sheepfold wall, tumblers of wine in hand, Miranda castigating Gilda’s hat, Paolina insisting it suits her perfectly. Heedless of both, Gilda’s gone dreamy about the gibbous moon and the first of the stars tangled in the tresses of the pines, while Niccolò, Fernando, Iacovo and Filiberto smoke the Toscanelli Miranda has passed among them. Fernando comes to kiss me as does Gilda, as though she and I haven’t seen one another since last week. Gilda whispers, ‘How I wish you could have heard him, Chou.’ I take the wine Paolina pours for me and look hard first at her, then at Niccolò, searching for some evidence of the Dulcinea effect, a sign that she has thrown him a rose. I ask after Ninuccia and Pierangelo.
‘They finished the harvest this morning and so stayed on the farm to celebrate with the others. I wanted all of them here but Ninuccia, being more rational than impetuous, muttered about loaves and fishes and tucked me into the ape,’ Miranda tells me.
Hungry but loath to go indoors, we drink our wine. Miranda comes closer to where Gilda and I stand, sniffs the air.
‘Chou, have you given up Opium for eau di benzina, the scent of gasoline? Gilli seems to be wearing the same. I shall not ask what the two of you have lately undertaken. Gilli, would you please go inside to turn the sausages?’
I go inside, too. Behind the bedsheet curtain, I begin spooning the galetti into small bowls or cups, whatever I can find. Gilda comes to help, placing the galetti on a tray with forks and three of the flatbreads. We all sit, take one another’s hand, thank the gods for another harvest. Miranda picks up one of the breads, tears a piece – pushing an extra fig onto it – passes it about and we begin this candlelit Thursday night at the oil-clothed table under the grape leaves, the rustico window open to the moon still rising above the Montefiascone road.
Her hat still in place, Gilda and I serve the supper while Miranda frets over Paolina, saying she looks feverish.
‘Fernando, change places with Paolina, will you? Her back should be to the fire.’
As we carry out the dishes, Gilda tells me she, too, notices something is amiss with Paolina.
‘Not fever, though, is it?’
‘Not fever,’ I say without looking at her.
‘Probably those damn Dutch torturing her twice a week with those endless gnocchi.’
‘Could be the damn Dutch.’
The tribe goes quiet over the pears, sheening ruby red from the wine. Just right with Filiberto’s new pecorino, they say. Chatter ceases again when Gilda puts down the sausages in Miranda’s old metal pan. I go around the table with the bowl of mashed wine-cooked potatoes and the colour of them raises suspicion until the taste of them pleases. Crumbs are the only evidence of the kilo round of vendemmia bread, still warm from the oven when we tore into its crust, hard and nearly black from rye and buckwheat flours. It’s Niccolò who suggests that we return outdoors for a breath of air, rest a bit before the dolce.
‘Rest? I think we should dance,’ Miranda says, all of us rising, she leading us out into the darkness. ‘It’s been so long since we’ve danced … How long has it been?’
‘A week. Last Thursday up near the orto,’ Filiberto reminds her, but she’s rooting about in her sweater pocket among the herbs and weeds for The Gypsy Kings. She can’t see the buttons on her tiny machine and so hands it to me to put into action. A shepherd, a Venetian, Iacovo the farmer and Sean Connery assemble and, as is the rural Umbrian way for men to dance, they stand in a circle, hold one another’s elbows and, as though they hear another kind of music, stamp their feet and kick their legs, move in some aboriginal tarantella, as much Russian and Greek as Italian. We women pair off and trot about on the gravel, our arms moving like the blades of a windmill and I see the scene as from a distance and I think how lovely this is, how unbearably lovely. Long before the tape ends, we stop, gather closer together and I am certain this is the moment when Niccolò will make his announcement. Rather it’s he who rounds up the tribe and guides us back to the table.
La torta al mosto is rich, properly underbaked so it’s as much pudding as cake. Slicing skinny pieces, I am named a miser and so I cut again. I try to count up the litres of wine with which we have made this supper and those we’ve drunk with it. I stop counting, let my thoughts wander back to the boy with the violin. To my son and Paganini. To Niccolò in the kilt. Neither he nor Paolina, save her flush, has exhibited any but the most usual behaviour. It’s Miranda who insists that Paolina leave her auto at the rustico, allow Niccolò to drive her home.
‘Stay abed tomorrow. I’ll stop by and …’
‘Mirandina, I’m quite well and …’
Paolina never uses the tender diminutive of Miranda’s name as do we others. Miranda takes note, says nothing more. Gilda begins to gather the last of the dishes from the table but Miranda waves her back into her chair, scans the table, pausing to stare at each of us until she turns back to Gilda whose hand she has taken into hers. Laughing, Miranda makes glittering slits of her blue-black eyes.
‘In the first half of your life, you have the face with which you were born; in the second half you have the face you’ve merited. I think that’s it. It occurs to me, maybe not often enough, that you are a fine-looking tribe. How many things do I save to tell you? Things I’ve always wanted you to know. Why do I count on your already knowing them? I should remember to say the words. Those words. Quanto vi voglio bene, ragazzi. How much I love you.’
We stay quiet until I – mostly because my throat’s too tight to let out a word – softly, slowly pound my hands upon the table. One by one, two by two, the others take up the ritual demonstration of honour.
Still plaintive, Miranda speaks over the commotion, ‘So you think it’s Athropos who decides? I mean, about when our time’s up? When to cut the thread?’ Her gaze far away, her voice is very small.
‘Amore mio, please, enough for tonight.’ Filiberto beseeches her with not quite feigned dismay.
‘Oh, I don’t intend to get back to God and the sublime ethics of Jesus or witchcraft, though I will say that over these past few days I’ve wondered about old Giuseppe and what became of him while Mary was off ascending and being assumed. History’s made mostly of empty spaces. In any case, I’ve had to rethink my image of Death after being reminded of those three women who sit somewhere spinning and snipping and … I’ve always thought of death as The Horseman. My father used to call him that: quel Cavaliere Nero, that black Horseman. Intimately and often, my father spoke of him. A long-time nemesis who lived just over the hill. I have always feared a man on a black horse.’
‘In Il Gattopardo, Don Fabrizio saw Death as a handsome woman in a brown travelling suit. She came to sit by his bed in the hotel, do you remember?’ I say this but do not say that I fear a woman in a brown suit.
‘With her sitting beside him, Fabrizio told himself he’d lived the sum of three happy weeks in his life. By which, I suppose, he meant he was tranquil about leaving with her.’ Paolina says this with spare conviction.
‘A few perfect days. I’ve had a whole handful of them, more than most, I think. No one has a right to more. Most days are made of something less than and something more than happiness.’ Miranda’s voice is a whisper.
‘Già, indeed.’ The tribe is in harmony.
A pair of candles he’d taken earlier from the armoire and tucked in his jacket pocket for just this moment, Fernando lights them now as the others burn away. Filiberto takes up his mandolin and tonight his hoarse whispery voice lulls Miranda. Her snoring a whistle, faint, steady, she sleeps as we do the washing up, smother the ashes, gather our things. Buonanotte.
Filiberto helps Miranda into his truck and I watch them, wonder about them. Does he stay with her in her house in Castelpietro? Does she stay with him in his house, which sits beyond the farthest meadow off the Montefiescone road? Once a fenile, a stone hay barn, it’s where he makes cheese, births lambs and tends the ailing ones, where he shears sheep, where he cooks and washes and eats and sleeps. Maybe the goddess of Buonrespiro is right: maybe the good half of a love is enough.
As we drive home, I wonder if the boy with the violin will pass through Orvieto again. I am happy that Gilda has so gracefully snitched the black velvet hat. Will Paolina marry Niccolò?
Late on Friday morning, Paolina calls: ‘The rustico wants a good cleaning. We were all so tired last night, I don’t even remember if we scrubbed the pots. Shall we take care of things together? Maybe tomorrow? Niccolò and his mates from San Severo are going to Rome on the 11:05. Did Fernando tell you that he’d invited him to go along? Pierangelo as well. Armando al Pantheon for lunch, a walk in the Villa Borghese, back to the train. They’ll be home in time to take you and Ninuccia and I for aperitivi and then to la Palomba for supper.’
‘Fernando is, at this moment, upstairs trying on jackets he hasn’t worn since Venice. He’s so pleased …’
‘You know he’d asked Niccolò if you and I and Ninuccia might go along but Niccolò wouldn’t have it. Just as well. Tomorrow, at about eleven.’
•
On Saturday I leave Fernando at the train station, arrive at the rustico just before eleven-thirty to find Paolina on her knees scrubbing the floor.
‘It was a ruse. Asking you to help me. All of it done in less than an hour. I haven’t lit the stove or the hearth fire. It’s so warm today …’
‘Come with me then, we’ll finish that later. I didn’t bring anything for breakfast. Or lunch. Emergency Venchi 85 per cent cacao, three bars in the glove box.’
‘We may need it.’
We take up our places prone among the weeds on the edge of Miranda’s oliveto and smoke Paolina’s hand-rolled cigarettes.
‘Do you want to know if I’ve accepted him?’
‘I suppose I do. Yes, I do.’
‘I’ll wait to tell you. I’ll wait until I’ve told you other things.’
•
Why can’t she just say, I did or I didn’t? Yes or no? I wonder as I look at Paolina who seems concentrated on her cigarette, taking it out of her mouth after each inhalation, holding it first close up, then farther away, pondering it as though the ‘other things’ she wishes to tell me were written on its thin white paper. It’s only after she bashes the last millimetre of it on a stone and drops the spent end of it in her metal box that Paolina begins.
‘Like a keening wraith, I roved about the rooms of the house where I was born, opening and slapping shut the doors, thinking if I opened them once again, he would be there. She would.’
As she lifts her gaze from a place somewhere in the weeds a streak of sunlight flickers across her eyes, illuminating the tears she’d thought to hide. She sits up, fiddles with a boot buckle. I sit up, caress her arm sooner than speak. After a while, it’s she who does.
‘Sto bene. I’m fine. Only, only a moment. I’m fine.’
Paolina tells me that she, an only child of only children, was not quite eighteen when the young black-bearded man who was her father died while ploughing the dark red earth of a tobacco field. On a Saturday it was when Paolina’s father died, a week to the day after her mother – ill and choosing not to linger – had hurried herself away.
‘Until almost the end of her days, my mother still ran my bath in the evening, woke me in the morning with a buongiorno principessa in falsetto, setting down on my bedside table a tray with a china pot of caffé latte and two croissants fat with marzipan, crusted with roasted almonds and still warm from the pasticceria. Amore mio, come hai dormito? My love, how did you sleep?
‘Though my father’s was a more reticent love, together their devotion commanded me, their authority so congenial I was breathless to resist. Mine had been a life measured out in the melodious two-note chime of meekness and reward. I was their good girl. And then they were gone. No matter how many times I opened and shut the doors, I was alone. Save for ‘uncle’ Niccolò.
‘Tall, broad, mercurial as a god was Niccolò back then. Like chunks of sky were his eyes and I loved the smell of his tweeds, smoked as they were in the burley ash of the Brebbia he held between his teeth even as he spoke. Even as he sucked and chewed on the little red pastilles flavoured with ratanhia root which he’d pinch from a silver matchbox tucked in the pocket of his vest. As though a companion shade swung a thurible in his wake, when Niccolò went away, the smell of him faded slow as incense. My father’s patron, my mother’s paladin, our personal banker, oftentimes our chef, Niccolò had been – for as long as I could remember – the perpetrator of small ecstacies, mostly gastronomic. And as my parents commanded me, just as benignly and consummately did Niccolò command them.
‘As Niccolò’s fattore di fiducia – trusted foreman – it was my father who kept in efficient production the small empire that composed his friend’s legacy: wheat fields and sheepfolds, plantations of tobacco and sunflowers, groves of olives and vineyards. With my father taking care of things for him, Niccolò was free to indulge his passions for the markets and the caffés and the trattorie. For his paramours. Back then, though, I’d known nothing of paramours.
‘Unexpected, unannounced, Niccolò was wont to tramp through the front hall and into our dining room of an evening just as we were sitting down to supper. He being our Elijah, my mother would set a place for him at every meal. Sometimes he’d just pull up his chair and make himself at home, grinning and rubbing together his hands as my mother helped him to the food, my father to the wine. But on other evenings he’d march in and begin snatching up plates and glasses, corking wine, wrapping the bread in a napkin. “Andiamo. Let’s go.”
‘“Let’s go? Where?” My mother would shout, throwing up her hands, while my father – his acquiesence to Niccolò a matter of routine – simply rose from his chair, went to turn off the oven and then to find his jacket.
‘Once I remember Niccolò pulling a corked, dark glass bottle from his coat pocket, ‘Ecco, behold, oil just pressed, just robbed from my own mill. Tomorrow is soon enough for pastasciutta. I booked Roncalli. Forza, forza, I’ve left the auto running …
‘“It’s an hour to Foligno, Niccolò,” my mother whined.
‘“What do you care? I’ve salame in the other pocket and wine in the boot.”
‘“But why? Everything is here and …”
‘“Because there will never be another Friday evening at eight o’clock on November 29, 1959. That’s why. Forza.”
‘My mother would strip off her pinafore, run to get her good shoes, lean over the sideboard checking herself in the mirror above it while she kicked off her slippers and slid into the suede pumps she wore to church. The points of her cheeks gone red like rosehips, she’d press her hands to her hair, deepening the already deep blonde waves of it while Niccolò stood there holding out her coat, telling her she would have made Botticelli crazy. Cinderella wrenched from her hearth was my mother, tantalised by a fleshly prince bent on a 10-centimetre Chianina beef steak barely warmed over an olivewood fire. I remember wishing Niccolò would hold out my coat for me. Wishing my own cheeks would go red as rosehips. And wishing my mother was like other mothers.
‘Niccolò would bury Norcia truffles in a sack of rice and place it, like an icon, on a shelf in the kitchen. He’d turn back to us, to my mother and me, and say, ‘The rice will be properly perfumed by Tuesday. I’ll bring everything else. Everything. Your job is to set the table and to be beautiful. Basta.’
‘He always looked at my mother when he said the part about being beautiful.
‘In the post basket hung on the front door, he’d leave a branch of peach blossom or one of tiny pomegranates, their broken skins bleeding juice the colour of Spanish wine. A just-slaughtered and dressed suckling lamb hung around his neck like a scarf, a haunch of deer in a sack slung over his shoulder, under his arm, a brown satin box with glacéed chestnuts nestling in the folds of its black velvet lining, it was Niccolò’s doing that by the time I was ten or so – and he was twenty-something – it was already difficult for me to separate one appetite from another. One hunger from another. I loved to eat. I loved zio Niccolò.
‘As I’ve said, I was just shy of eighteen when my parents died and in the early days of grieving, Niccolò was my refuge. Burrowing my face into the man-smelling tweed of his coat, his great brown hands caressing my hair, I waited for him to tilt my chin up to him, to press his lips to my forehead. When he moved his hands from my hair to my breasts, I looked straight at him, into his eyes like chunks of sky. I wept and I smiled. I remember looking behind him, as though to make sure she wasn’t there. My mother with the rosehip cheeks and the Botticelli face, a strap of her sundress slipping down over the white marble of her shoulder, little beads of sweat glossing her upper lip as she rolled the umbricelli – one by one – across the wooden board while Niccolò sat watching her. No, she wasn’t there. My rival was no more. Thin solace for the loss of a mother was my victory. Bitter recompense, I thought, pushing my face deeper into Niccolò’s chest, trying not to ask myself if losing her was precisely what I’d longed for.
‘He would cook for me every day, Niccolò would. I remember most a soup he’d make. He’d sit me down at the kitchen table, slide a small glass of white wine across the oilcloth to me.
‘“Allora. Guardami bene. Watch me carefully.” He’d skin and slice a pair of onions faster than the butter could melt in the sauté pan he’d placed on the burner behind him.
‘“Sempre una fiamma bassa per la minestra. Always a low flame for soup.” He’d leave the onions to melt into the butter while he gathered up the rest of what he needed: yesterday’s bread, some milk, a few branches of dried wild thyme, the bottle of white wine. When the onions were soft and gold, he’d rub some rough salt between his hands and then sprinkle the onions with flour; he’d slip the thyme leaves off their branches and crush them between his fingertips over the pan. The stems in his shirt pocket to use later in the hearth. He’d give the mass a good stir, letting the flour and the butter bubble away for a minute; some milk, then some wine. I think about a cup of each. Maybe more wine than milk. When the soup had just begun to thicken, he’d take it from the flame, cover it, let the thyme do its work while he toasted thin slices of the old bread, brushed them with butter, laid them in two wide shallow bowls. He’d sit with me then and we’d drink another glass of wine. He would never set our places directly on the oilcloth even if we were sitting down only to soup or cheese and bread. He’d take out one of the fine embroidered cloths from the armoire, spread it smooth, knot the napkins on one end and, flicking his wrist, shake each one before laying it down, aligning the knot perfectly with the silverware. He’d light a candle even at noon. I think he made the wild thyme soup for me nearly every day for the first month or so. “Curativo,” he would say. “Healing.”
•
He must have known before I did that I was with child because when, all breathless and bridal, I ran to open the door to him one morning after I’d seen Dottoressa Ottaviano, Niccolò sat me down at the kitchen table and immediately began speaking of the aspetto practico, the practical aspect, of our situation.
‘“But Niccolò, there’s time for all of that. Now we must celebrate, think about the wedding, about our child, about …”
‘“Tesoro mio, ti voglio tanto bene ma io non mi sposarò mai. Mai. My darling, I love you but I will never marry. Never. Oh, it’s not that I don’t like weddings. I would have been a bridegroom a hundred times over by now as long as I could have avoided being a husband. I will hold financial responsibility, be a figure in the child’s life, sustain both of you in every way save that of living together as a family. We can even have a wedding if you want. But no marriage.”
‘He rose then, washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Pontius Pilate with a pipe. Taking a clean towel from the drawer in the cupboard, he slowly dried his hands. He began looking through the onions in the basket on the work table.
‘“I’ll do the shopping,” he said, buttoning his jacket.
‘Heeding the old impulse to meekness, I sat quietly. When he returned sometime later, his market bag full, he found me where he’d left me. As though the news might be balm, he said he’d been to consult his attorney. Across the shiny red and yellow cloth on the table, Niccolò spread bank books, lists of goods and chattels, a copy of his testament. The pipe tight between his teeth, he droned out numbers while I unpacked the market bag, moving his papers to make room for white-skinned potatoes and tight little heads of red lettuce, two of purple garlic, the dried stems of them knotted together like castanets. I kept picking up each thing as though weighing it, then putting it down. I never said a word. He relit his pipe, signifying that his presentation was complete.
‘“Ma, l’amore? But what about love?” I wanted to know, my voice cracking as though I’d just awakened from a long sleep. As though I’d been weeping in my dreams.
‘Drying my face with the back of his hand, the stem of his pipe still between his teeth, he’d whispered, “Povera cocca, poor little one, it’s duty that counts in life. Amore. Amore. Love. Love. Bread lasts longer than love. I want to offer you something better.”
‘The meekness in me thawed and boiled up like rage. Ripping his hands from my face, sending the documents and the onions flying from the table with a single sweep of my arm, I beat him about the chest that had been my refuge, clawed his cheeks, wrenched the grizzled black and brown pomp of his hair, tore the Brebbia from his mouth and smote it on the tiles. I bent to retrieve one of the bank books and, heaving it into the ashes of the hearth, I stood straight, laid a back-handed slap across his face and ran for the door. Flinging it wide and letting it bang against the wall, I remembered my coat, which he’d already gone to fetch. As he held it out for me, I snatched it from him, thinking of how many times I’d longed for that, for Niccolò to hold out my coat as he did for her. I walked away, shutting the door hard on his last words: “Lunch will be ready in an hour.”
‘My pace fast as my heartbeat, I traversed the few metres to the piazza. I turned back to see if he’d followed me, but there was only a small band of children from the kindergarten approaching in the bleak March light, harassing the pigeons while their teachers walked behind them, smoking hungrily. I sat down on the iron bench by the fountain, my grand revolt already on the wane, having exhausted itself on the truth that I had been Niccolò’s seductress. If ever a woman offered herself to a man, I’d offered myself to him. A revelation. A plain truth. I wrapped my arms about my chest as if trying to find the repentance in me but there was none. I let one hand drop to lie on my stomach. On my womb. Big as a bean and not yet meat, a creature was ripening inside me and, while I’d been pining over a wedding dress, it had already shaken the kaleidoscope, rethrown the stones and the pattern they made was my future.
‘Would I go back to the house now and take up my submissiveness? Invite Niccolò to the role of loving tyrant only just vacated by my parents? Would I surrender my child, too, to Niccolò’s dominion? I will hold financial responsibility, be a figure in the child’s life, sustain both of you in every way save that of living together as a family. No. Thank you, but, no. No, to every part of your offer, Niccolò. No.
‘His back to me, he was slicing bread when I walked into the kitchen. Before he turned, I knew what I would see in those eyes and I longed to comfort him. I’d become someone more, someone less than who I’d been a scant hour before. Leaps of comprehension and self-trust, a capacity for empathy, if these deem to come in life, they come like lightning, in un colpo, in a flash. Unlike the sort of change that happens over time. Unlike change that is won by faithful pummelling – of one’s self or of another. Nothing fresh about that kind of change. While I’d been sitting there by the fountain in the piazza in that bleak March light I’d vaulted the wall of the sanctuary. On my own, I was.
‘“Also I, Nicò. I will never marry. I will be a bride a hundred times over but I will never be a wife.” I’d meant him to laugh but as he turned, the bread knife poised, there was only desolation in his eyes. He looked at me. Studied me.
‘“Hai fame? Are you hungry?”
‘“Si.”
‘“Brava.”
‘We sat and he poured wine. Not waiting for him to serve me as he always did, I took up the white fluted bowl of tiny purple artichokes and pushed some onto his plate. I took a few for myself.
‘“Ma, domani, cucinerò io,” I told him. “But tomorrow, I will cook.”
‘He stayed quiet. After a long time, he began a mild sort of protest but let it fall away.
‘“Va bene.” His voice was a whisper. He raised his glass to me. “Your eyes are black in this light. They’re purple in the sun. Your eyes make a man think, Paolina. Only poetic men will love you. The others will try to change you. The others won’t be able to look in your eyes. I wish I were a poet, Paolina.”
•
‘It was a Monday morning, a fews day after our joint “proclamations”: Niccolò’s to me, mine to him. And my own to myself. I was sitting, dreaming, by the salone window when I saw them walking across the piazza on their way to me: the parish priest, his mother and his aunt. Don Umberto, Carolina and Luigia. Though the trio had been visiting me every Monday morning since my parents’ death, I’d somehow not remembered on that particular Monday that it was their day. But there they were, the women in sedate frocks and elastic hose almost pink against their black lace-up shoes. Shawls, hats with veils and white cotton gloves, cloth-covered baskets hung from their wrists. As she was wont to do, Carolina minced ahead of the others, her head pitched slightly forward of her body, insistent as a lead goose. Apart from my parents and Niccolò, these three were as close to kin as I’d ever had. I went to put the kettle on, take off my apron.
‘“Buongiorno, bella,” they said in unison, commencing with the ritual unpacking of their gifts: torte, biscotti, pane. Jars of jam and little pots of savoury things to spread on bread. As though there’d been a flood or a war or some devastation that had emptied the shops which sat all along the piazza outside my door, they would replenish my supplies. The one constant provision was a thick green litre bottle of Marsala beaten with eggs and sugar. Simpatia, Carolina called it. Sympathy.
‘Having been assigned to the parish just after his ordination when he was something less than twenty-five, Umberto celebrated the high mass when my parents were married, cleansed me from original sin in a bath of holy water, put the body of Jesus on my devoutly extended tongue when I was seven, inflamed my quest to be confirmed a soldier of Christ when I was twelve. Umberto said the euology for both my parents. He never left my side when they were being lowered into the ground.
‘And Carolina. Unflinching, bold and yet refined, the kind of woman who would dress for dinner in the jungle, she’d fasten the fifty hooks on a boned corset before setting off on the twenty-metre trek from the parish house to the butcher. That was Carolina. When she was widowed at fifty, she departed Rome for San Severino to keep house for her son. Not to be abandoned in the family palazzo in the Parioli, Luigia – her elder and maiden sister – arrived days later at the station in Orvieto. “For a small month,” she’d said back then – thirteen years ago.
‘That morning, as she did always, Luigia made the tea while Carolina laid the table in the salone and Umberto and I, in a posture that had long become natural to us, sat leafing through one book or another. For the five years of my tenure in the liceo classico, Umberto had been my Latin tutor. But long before that he was drawn, I think, to the melancholy in me, mirroring his own as it did. Having himself been formed by the Jesuits, so would he form me, a bright, quiet lamb, black, among his flock. And so on that morning he commenced his usual imperatives: “It’s time, Paolina, that you should be choosing a facoltà, a major course of study.” He spoke of enquiries he’d made to colleagues at the university in Perugia, said that he’d alerted one of them that I would need preparation for certain exams. “Were you to succeed in these, well, he would see to things. If you decide on Philosophy, I think we could manage to place you in that department.”
‘“I’m going to have a baby, Umberto.”
‘I said this without changing the tenor of my voice. I stood up from where I’d been sitting on the sofa next to him and said it again.
‘“You see, I’m going to have a baby.”
‘Carolina and Luigia, both of whom had been still fussing with the table, heard the repetition of my announcement. Both sat heavily on the nearest chairs. Luigia began to laugh.
‘“Of course you are. Amore mio, of course you’ll have a baby someday and we’ll all dance at your wedding and …”
‘“In September. I’m going to have a baby in September.”
‘“This September?” Carolina had risen from her chair and come to stand in front of me. “This one,” I told her.
‘I turned back to Umberto and then looked at Luigia, both of whom were gazing downward.
‘“My time will be up on the eighteenth. Dottoressa Ottaviano and I, we did the counting together. That is, I went to see her a few days ago and, well … I …”
‘They were silent. I wept.
‘“Niccolò?” Umberto looked at me, his eyes saying he hoped it was as much as he hoped it wasn’t.
‘“Niccolò,” I said.
‘“I’ll speak to him … I’m certain his intentions are …”
‘“Niccolò and I have already spoken. We’re … we’ve decided not to marry.”
‘“Inconcepibile, inconceivable …”
‘I fear the conceiving has already been done, Umberto,” muttered Carolina.
‘“Both of us have decided. I will raise my baby. Niccolò will be a part in some way but not as my husband. Not as the child’s father. Neither of those. I can’t begin to tell you how dearly I want this.”
‘Forever the lead goose, Carolina had left the salone to rummage in the kitchen. I began to follow her there but she was already returning, shaking the green glass Marsala bottle as she came. The bottle still in hand, she went to the credenza where the finer things of the house were kept. As though suspending the drama that had unfolded behind her, Carolina mused, humming, among the wineglasses. Rather than one of them, she opted for a cut-crystal compote dish from my mother’s precious Bohemian collection. Setting it down on the table, she began to pour in the creamy sugared wine. So long did she pour, she had time to look up at me and smile and look down again before she’d poured enough.
‘“Drink this,” Carolina said. “I put more sugar than usual in it this week. And cinnamon, too. Sapevo io. I knew. Siamo ancora in Italia, no? We’re still in Italy, no? If a man and a woman are alone together for more than twenty minutes, it has always been assumed that they have made love. Sapevo. I knew.”
‘Luigia hissed, “Scema … Fool …”
‘Eyes closed, I silently willed Carolina not to proceed with another indelicacy, not to be her haughty, disparaging self. A half moment of truce, Carolina, I beg you. Then I heard her words again. If a man and a woman are alone together for more than twenty minutes, it has always been assumed that they have made love. I couldn’t tell if she repeated them or if I heard them from inside of me, from far away. Her words were a caption to images that began to slice fast as a guillotine across the back of my eyes. I saw my mother and Niccolò working in the kitchen when I’d return from school, their unpacking wine or oil or bushels of fruit from the boot of Niccolò’s auto, my waking from a nightmare and, still half asleep, wandering downstairs to find Niccolò alone in the salone. “Dove sono mamma e papà. Where are my mother and my father?” I asked Niccolò.
‘“Your father went to help cover the vines against the frost. The men telephoned … Your mother, I think, I think … she’s, yes, she’s bathing. Yes. Bathing. Twenty minutes. Of course.”
‘“Amore mio, bevi. Drink, my love,” Carolina was saying to me. Already convulsed, the smell of raw egg and sweet wine brought shivers. I sipped daintily. Carolina goaded. I sipped again.
‘Through all of this Umberto had kept his silence. He rose then, came to his place at table. Carolina sat next to me. All the cutting and pouring and passing made a reassuring noise.
‘“There’s so much to talk about, isn’t there?” said Carolina.
‘Adjusting her slipped shoulder pads back to their proper geometric formation, she asked, “Who would have thought we’d be having a baby in September?”
Over time I was able to calm, somewhat, Carolina’s possessiveness of me and my “condition”. I managed to convince her – and Luigia, too – that I could nicely manage my days, that I ate and slept properly, walked briskly for several kilometres twice a day, that I never raised my hands above my head (so as not to stretch the umbilical cord, which could then wrap about the baby’s neck), that I kept nothing of the baby’s layette in the house after sunset. This last meant that, as I’d finish knitting a cap or sewing tabs on some miniscule undershirt or cutting up sheets into diapers, I’d go dutifully to put the things in an old maroon leather trunk, which Carolina had especially provided and placed in the woodshed. Over it, she’d hung a print of a Botticelli Madonna in a wide gold frame. Coincidenza, coincidence, I thought … willing away images of my mother. Every time I went to open or close the trunk, I would carefully avert my gaze from her.
‘I dined at the parish house once a week and our Mondays at my place were observed, sacred as mass. Though we spoke always about the baby, the subject of Niccolò we forsook, the moat too wide and deep around him. Umberto, however, I saw only by chance, he neither accompanying the women to me on Mondays nor being present when I dined at the parish house. “You know how it is, Paolina. He’s always taking on more than …” When we did meet in the town, Umberto was remote but not uncharitable. My status with him had shifted from protégée to parishioner. I was reconciled to this.
‘Niccolò continued to spend part of every day with me. And, as I’d earlier announced that I would, I began to cook for him, in my fashion. Boiling and roasting things to their wreckage. He was patient. I think his grand defence must have been to stop at one of his haunts before coming to me each day, to slurp down a plate of pasta or ravage the bruschette and crostini served in the bars with aperitivi. His single obstinacy about our cooking and dining arrangement was that he continue to gather up the provisions.
‘Even before I was bathed and dressed in the morning, I would hear him trilling ‘funiculi, funicula’ in the kitchen as he thumped down the morning’s goods on the table. He’d fill the Bialetti, put it on a quiet flame, shout buongiorno, tesoro, and leave me, unencumbered, to my acts of destruction. Sometimes I’d find a scribbled suggestion, a few lines of method, a caveat. One day he wrote: “Lascia il cibo essere se stesso. Non mascherare. Esalta. Let the food be itself. Don’t mask. Exult.” I thought the words provocative. Almost like a dare. I remember tucking the scrap of paper in my pocket, pushing it deep into the bottom like a love letter. A charm. It was the only cooking lesson Niccolò ever gave to me. I’d recite the words over and over again every time I took up my knife or set a pot on the flame. It wanted time, though, before I began to act out the words. The first time I did, it was on a morning in July.
‘In a large green basket with a broken handle, Niccolò left the first tomatoes he’d harvested from his own vines. Big and sun-split and smelling of heat and of the basil planted between the rows, these tomatoes. I fondled the warm satin skin of the misshapen things, turned them over and over, marvelling at them as though I’d never before seen a tomato. Carrying the basket on my upturned arms over to the sink, I began to rinse them, laying them on a nice white towel to dry and, as I washed the last one, I put it to my nose, and then to my mouth. Ravenous for that tomato, I bit deep into its pulp, gasping on its flesh as though I’d been starved and it was the last food in the world. Standing there over the sink, devouring the thing, careless of the juices running down my neck and into the bosom of my dress, all I could think was: This is how I want our lunch to taste.
‘At first I meant to simply break open the fruits and serve them as they were – with knife and fork and a dish of salt. But then I took up a small, sharp knife and set to roughly chopping the tomatoes into the wide shallow bowl we used for pasta. I rubbed sea salt over and, holding my thumb over the olive oil flask, poured on thin threads of oil. Stirring it all together I was tempted to tear in leaves of basil and marjoram then, to cover the bowl and place it over a pot of simmering water as I’d seen my mother and Niccolò do when fixing sugo crudo, raw sauce. No. I would chase, further yet, this idea of revealing a food’s own goodness. Better that these beauties be warmed under the sun that birthed them than over a gas flame. With the white towel I’d used to dry the tomatoes, I covered the bowl, carried it out to the garden and left it on a table where no shade would reach it. Let the food be itself. Don’t mask. Exult.
‘Moving in an epiphanous daze, wiping my hands down the length of my apron, stopping them to caress the place where my child was growing, I walked back to the kitchen. I was a mother. I was a cook. I was becoming a cook.
‘I surveyed the other good things Niccolò had left for me and began tasting them, this way and that, in my mind. Out in the rustico – the summer kitchen – I built an olivewood fire in the hearth, the first one I’d ever made without my mother or Niccolò helping to tease the flames to their dance. The tomatoes out there in the garden and the good fire I’d set raised up in me a strange blend of conceit and awe so that, once back in the house, I set to my own sort of makeshift dance. Slicing finger-sized zucchini whisper-thin on the mandolino, I dressed them with oil warmed with a branch of mentuccia – wild mint – and left the bowl handy so I could give them a stir every time I passed by. As the fire began to smoulder, I laid tiny, fat, whole fennel bulbs on the grate and, when the stringy, sweet-licorice flesh of them had gone soft, I slipped the bulbs into a pan and set it down in the ash. As I’d seen my father do, I threaded the sausages that Niccolò had brought that morning from Mocetti onto vine twigs soaked in water. The sausages cooked and dripped juices onto the fennel resting below. I opened the wine.
‘Niccolò arrived. Seeing that I’d left nothing much for him to do, he washed his hands, sat at his place. An elbow resting on the table, his hand supporting his chin, he watched me. Another Paolina, freshly pirouetted from her cocoon.
‘A morning’s sojourn in the sun had caused the tomatoes to give up their juices and, like soup, I ladled them into bowls. Beside each bowl I set down a long flat, crusty ciabatta, split and barely toasted over the embers. Dipping a branch of rosemary into a saucer of oil, I rubbed the charred crevices of the bread, dipping the branch again and again into the oil and painting the bread with it, pushing hard on the rosemary, bruising its leaves against the hot bread until the rosemary gave up its scent. Half a ciabatta for Niccolò and half for me. I brought in the sausages then, laid them over the fennel, wetting both with the pan drippings. More bread. The little salad of raw zucchini refreshed us and, as an end to the meal, we finished the wine and sat there plucking leaves from the bouquet of mentuccia, wild mint, that I’d set in a pewter jug on the table, chewing them like candy.
‘Though I don’t recall what I cooked or ate for lunch four days ago, I remember every morsel of that one in a July of more than forty years ago. I will always. It would have been enough, that lunch. Had the Fates never allowed me the peace and plenty in which to cook and eat that way again, I could have lived off that one. I was safe.
‘Niccolò never said much about the food I set before him that day nor about the food I set before him on the days that followed. He knew and I knew that, by saying little, he was saying everything.
•
‘Soon after the tomato lunch Niccolò began stopping by to fetch me at seven in the morning. “Faremo le spese insieme. We’ll shop together,” he’d said.
‘Primped, lustrous, scented in neroli, Niccolò – already feverish over the glories that might be waiting in the markets – would appear while I’d still be pinning up my hair, looking for a sweater or my boots, the sleep just rinsed from my eyes.
‘“Tonino should have figs today. Taste the borlotti before you buy them. Crisp and juicy they should be but not bitter. Take two kilos. And we’ll need to put baccalà to soak today if you want to cook it on Friday. Walnuts from the Lazio truck, don’t forget those.”
‘On Saturdays we’d go to both our own market and then to Orvieto, where we’d mostly just meander in the way one does when what’s desired has already been found. We’d go to the wagon that dispensed porchetta, thick slices of wood-roasted suckling pig, boned and stuffed with a mash of its innards and wild herbs and I’d ask for one with crackling skin for Nicò, one without for me. Sitting on the steps of the Palazzo del Capitano, we’d eat and talk about food.
‘“Before you cook a dish, you must be able to taste it. Go through the process first in your mind. Imagine yourself choosing the ingredients. Be sure of how you want them to look and smell and feel. Think about your pan or pot, your knife, get to work. Pour in the oil and begin warming it over a gentle flame; throw in a fine mince of pancetta or lard, wild thyme or rosemary or, better, both. Turn up the flame just a little; now the garlic, then the onions. When the pancetta is crisp, the onions and garlic are golden and transparent and the herbs are fragrant, spoon it all out into a large deep dish. Dry the pieces of meat and lay them in the pan, leaving them to crust in the perfumed fat over a modest flame. Leave them longer than you think you should. Tanta patienza ci vuole. You’ll want great patience. When all the flesh is crusted, add it to the dish with the aromatics. Turn up the flame and pour the wine into the hot, very hot pan, stirring and scraping until the bottom of the pan is clean. Now tip the dish of aromatics and crusted flesh back into the pan. The wine in the pan should be enough to wet the flesh but not to drown it. When the wine begins to shimmer, lower the heat, cover the pot almost all the way. Leave the flesh to braise in the barely shuddering wine. Never should there be a more violent movement than that shudder. Every hour, add a few tablespoons more wine. After a time, that tiny aperture between the pot and its lid will have sent up sufficient winey vapours to scent the house. Your hair will smell of wine and rosemary. Go out for a short walk so that you can come back inside to take in the full effect of that winey steam. Now. Go through this exercise a few times and then you’ll be ready to cook.”
‘I listened to Nicò’s recipes as I would a fable, the words transporting me to a mythical kitchen where I could see the wine shuddering in that pan and smell the thyme and the onions. I went to bed that night and cooked myself to sleep, starving for that butter-soft flesh crusted in the fat and the wine and the herbs in which it had lolled for days and nights over a barely lit flame. I dragged a crust of imaginary bread into the imaginary sauce and then slept the angels’ sleep.
‘“Where did you learn those recipes?” I asked him one day.
‘“In my grandmother’s salottino.” Niccolò told me that during the war he and his cousins lived with her, their parents having been otherwise occupied with the Resistance. He was the eldest of the grandchildren, a kind of surrogate uncle to seven younger children. From time to time he would defy his father’s orders to stay and manage things for them and instead set off to join one branco or another up in the hills, mostly in Toscana. “But I never stayed away for more than a few days, time enough to enact some lesser violence against the Krauti before getting back to safeguarding my own,” Nicò told me.
‘“Better off than many, a little worse off than others, there was always some sort of supper for us. Mostly it was polenta, sometimes with a sauce. When it was cooked, my grandmother would pour it into a bowl, let it cool and then turn the great yellow dome of it out onto a pewter tray lined with a cloth. With all the pomp of a chef carrying a flaming pudding into a grand hall, she’d bring it to the fire, cut it into thick slices with a length of cotton string and set them to sizzle on the grate. Meanwhile, she’d tell us the story of one dish or another, of some luscious cake made with roasted walnuts and prunes soaked in Marsala or bread made with red wine and cinnamon, which her own grandmother would make at harvest time and bring out to the vineyards, still warm, with a pot of chestnut honey. The recipe she told most often, though, was the one I told to you. Only she told it better. Soft, breathless, her voice was the kind you had to listen hard to hear, and we sat there on the stone floor she’d laid with straw, looking up at her, rapt as a nest of starving birds. Tristezza – sadness – and joy watered her eyes and quivered about her lips and, young as we were, we knew. Young as we were, we knew her story was about more than food and so it became about more than food to us.”
‘“Listen with your soul’s ear,” she’d tell us. “It can hear the things that those foolish ones sticking out of your head can’t hear at all.”
‘“When the polenta was crisp and gold and beginning to burn at its edges, she’d offer each one of us a slice from the tip of her toasting fork, so hot we’d burn our hands and then our lips and our tongues and she’d keep talking while spearing the next slices. We gorged on them. On the story. As much on the story, I think. She made cooks of all of us you know. Every one.”
‘“She died soon after the war ended. I remember helping my mother to wrap my grandmother’s kitchen things in newspaper. Almost everything fitted into two small boxes; a meagre store of pots, the mortars in which she pounded her herbs, two etched blue goblets from her wedding feast, the shallow white bowls in which she served almost everything, mismatched table silver, all of it dainty and fine and gifted to her – a spoon and fork at a time – from the legacies of aunts and cousins. By comparison, my father left a noble’s ransom to me, an estate which I’ve since managed to enrich. And yet I will never have as much to leave as she.”’
•
‘When Niccolò was with me it was good, and when he wasn’t it was another kind of good: a wider good, better lit. I began to feel a quiet relief that he and I would not be repeating the ménage à trois I’d lived with my parents: mother, father and child, smooth as three paving stones carved and keyed to lock together. No. Not that for us. Having swerved easily enough away from thinking to be in love with him, my passions seemed inclined toward liberty. How I waited for the evenings when Niccolò would be off to the other side of his life, to his friends. To his mystery. Possessive of my solitude, nothing and no one would distract me from the wonder I was feeling about the child inside me. I would read or knit, take some small supper of broth and bread but mostly I would just sit and caress the place where the baby was. Niccolò’s affection for me was a comfort that I brushed against but never leant upon. Even then, though, I’d understood that this liberty – this solitude – I was chasing would sometimes feel like aloneness and that the abyss between solitude and aloneness would be deep and dark. And so I wondered about love. About that absorbing kind of love. You and me against the world. Did I fear that? Did I believe in it? And if one risked such a thing, could even love save one from aloneness? I thought not. I think not.
‘As I was then made of that fragile sort of thinness, more bone than flesh, and still wore mourning, the child growing in me had become quickly evident. Black dresses with padded shoulders and belted waists, the skirts falling to the calf, tea-length we called them. Oxfords with high thick heels, black cotton stockings. Even in summer. No more than I sought to display my baby did I try to hide him.
‘As respectful to me in public as he was in private, Niccolò and I moved through some of each day as a couple might. We’d take breakfast standing at the bar in Ducchi, queue at the butcher’s and at the post office, make the struscio – the evening stroll, up and down the corso, sit in the caffés for aperitivi, look in the shops. We were serene while the town clucked and wagered and watched, planting and harvesting rumours like so much wheat.
‘Surely, the San Severese factored my tragic losses into the gauge of their censure. If some sewed me a scarlet letter, they pinned it to my turned shoulders and never to my breast. Carolina was my champion, after all. Her undisguised benediction of me – and Umberto’s reserved acquiescence – suffocated the gossip, if not always to its death.
‘Unmarried and with child in a small rural Umbrian town in the last years of the 1960s, I might well have scorched with shame at every social encounter and yet I never did. I suppose some of the locals thought Niccolò would eventually marry me or that I would surrender my child to the nuns or have the decency to remove myself to another town apart from their genteel sensibilities. Unreflected considerations, all of those. I shall never know how it was that, at the age of eighteen, I’d managed to grasp onto the truth that what others would say or think of me mattered less than what I thought of myself. I felt no mortification for my indiscretion with Niccolò, the shame in me being already engaged elsewhere.
•
‘Stasia Lazzari. Even her name was lovely. Wherever she went, my mother brought all the light and took up all the air. Under the convincing pretence of devotion, my mother’s every gesture was provoked by vanity, a superiority complex she wrapped in an often slavish humility. She accentuated her beauty by understatement. A natural actress, her long-standing and preferred role was Victim. The beleaguered mother. She’d buy her dresses from the used pile in the markets while mine were hand-smocked by a sarta in Florence. That escaped tendril, that fallen shoulder strap, were her at-home costume while my father’s cast-off sweater and slippers with ankle socks, even in the rain, made up her public masquerade. La Piccola Fiammiferaia. The Little Match Girl. This one with green eyes iridescent as the neck of a pheasant. Stasia Lazzari was irresistible.
‘Even those daily ten-metre trips to fetch my pastries were performances. She’d never simply stand in line to wait for them but groan and shake her head, reciting at studied intervals the same lament: “Per la figlia, beata lei che è ancora a letto. Intanto la mamma fa tutto. For my blessed daughter who is still in bed. Meanwhile her mother does everything.”
‘Her friends and my friends would tell me of this repeated scene, ask me how I could permit my poor mother to do my bidding. “I’ve asked, begged. A million times. Ti prego, mamma. I beg you. Don’t bring me pastries. I prefer to have breakfast in the bar with my friends.” How I hated those croissants. But should I leave them untouched, she would announce my ingratitude that afternoon in the shops, grist for the evening’s supper table in who knows how many households. I took to leaving a few crumbs on the plate and hiding the rest in my knapsack to later tear up for the birds in the schoolyard. Unimportant in itself, this years-long pastry farce that Stasia and I practised was, though, a symbol of our unrelatedness. I was invisible to her save as an opportunity for the display of her virtue. The bleached-white, sugar-starched emblem of her excellence.
‘As a small girl I’d been Stasia’s devotee, shadowing her as she kneaded bread, ironed sheets. And when, before church or a supper out with my father, she’d perform a half-hearted toilette, I’d sit in the middle of her bed to watch: face powder from a gold tin she’d pat on with a pink puff and then, using a small brush which she’d wet on her tongue and rub across what looked like shoe polish in a tiny glass jar, she’d stroke her eyelashes – blonde and thick as a pony’s – quickly, savagely, until they were black and curled against the green slant of her eyes. From the sack of her trinkets, I would choose her earrings. Sometimes a necklace. I remember only two dresses in her armoire, both of dark silk in more or less the same chaste form. Now that I think about it, there was another dress, black and made of some heavy fabric, perhaps faille. Straight and plain as a pencil from the front, she seemed so tall in that dress and when she turned there was a bustle, a small drape which fell from her waist to sit just above the curve of her derrierè. Not a proper Victim’s dress. I think she must have worn it only on the occasions when she and my father would drive into Rome.
‘I don’t remember Stasia touching me, save when she dressed or washed me. Pulling, tugging, scrubbing, her affection utilitarian, purposeful. A good-night buss on the cheek, though not always. Nothing I could count on. When she sat to shell peas or tail beans or to talk on the telephone, I would sidle up next to her, rest my leg against hers, put my shoulder to her arm. I’d loop a finger possessively inside the hem of her skirt and just sit there, preening. Even then, when I was little, I’d always felt I was somehow older than Stasia, that I was the mother.
‘Over time, my enchantment frayed, as it was bound to. She began to exhaust me and I consoled myself with finespun designs of wickedness against her. Among my most treacherous reveries, though, none were so extravagant as those that she and the Fates designed: the Match Girl flawlessness of her illness, her death. So you see, my shame back then, it was all used up on my mother.
‘How did Stasia become herself? I still wonder about that. Do we become or are we begotten? What chance do we have? What was my mother’s story? Did she mother me as she, herself, had been mothered? Is that what we do? Please God, no daughter for me. I fear that one evening my little girl would be sitting on my bed, humming over my jewels, and the next she’d be plotting revenge. I’d be doomed to make a daughter suffer. Who am I to think I wouldn’t? Please God, no daughter.
•
‘Allora. I spent that summer knitting and sewing, roaming the markets and cooking for Niccolò, talking and singing to my baby. But it was also during those weeks that, guided by a coverless and tattered illustrated volume Niccolò found in a vintage bookstall in Florence, I discovered the alchemy of cooking sweets. The Traditional Convent Pastries of Sicily. Transforming the kitchen into a laboratory, for the beating of creams and icings and the tempering of chocolate, I pummelled kilos of almonds with sugar into marzipan and crystallised gorgeous summer fruits and flowers in almond-perfumed sugar syrup. I tinted biscuit dough in the palest pink and pushed balls of it around in bowls of pine nuts or sesame seeds or roasted bitter almonds. Candied fruit and liqueurs I mixed with ewe’s-milk ricotta and sugar and, after spreading the paste between rum-soaked layers of sponge cake, I covered the whole with a sheet of almond paste, glazed it with a thin pistachio-green icing and decorated the gorgeous mess with sugared violets. A fairly authentic reading of la Cassata. Loyal and willing beneficiaries, Carolina and Luigia would, at any given sitting, dispatch a dozen pastries, a tin of cookies, sugaring their heaving bosoms as they nibbled, crusting their lips with bits of pistachio.
‘When I would go to supper at the parish house, I’d fill a kilo-weight tin with the day’s lovely things and, resting it on the great mound of my stomach, make my way across the piazza. On one of those evenings, Luigia had gone with Umberto to an event in Perugia and Carolina and I were to dine alone.
‘I remember how distracted she was, Carolina. We sat so long in the front garden with a glass of wine that I’d thought there’d be no supper at all until she finally hurried me inside and into the dining room, set down plates of soup. I remember it was a puree of green beans and basil and it tasted so good to me. Then there were thin slices of a veal galantine with a wine jelly that sparkled. Rifreddo, she called it. “One of Beppa’s masterpieces made with bits picked from a Sunday roast,” she’d said somewhat distractedly. Beppa was the parish-house cook. I was starving and so kept slipping another piece and another onto my plate, tipping a silver pitcher of sharp, vinegary sauce and skating crusts of bread through it. There was a blue-and-white-footed bowl heaped with tiny pickles. Carolina didn’t touch the food. She would begin to say something, interrupt herself, look at me as though for help, as though I should know what she wanted to say. After a while I left her sitting there. I cleared the table, brought plates into the kitchen. I brewed espresso, carried in the tray and set it down before her. Still as stone, she sat.
‘“Carolina? What is it, Carolina? Can you tell me?”
‘Fluttering back from where she’d been, she laughed. Her skin rosy in the candle gleams, she seemed a Carolina more mysterious. I sat, poured out the espresso. Rising from her place across from me, she picked up her cup and came to sit next to me. With the artless sort of candour one might use to reveal one’s self to a lone seatmate on a night train – unheated, unlit and speeding through a tundra – Carolina began to talk.
‘“I don’t want to be or become one who paints the past, rubs it to a glimmer so it bears no resemblance to the half-ruin every one of us makes of life. I want to do a good job with what’s left of my time so that I won’t have to do some kind of fancy mental restoration later on.”
‘She drained her tiny cup in a single sip, held it a moment longer in front of her mouth, looked at me over the rim, recognising that she’d already lost me.
‘“I … can you tell me what it is that you …?” I asked her.
‘“Let me begin again. You, knowing me as you do – or as you think you do – how would you describe me to someone? What would you say?”
‘“That you’re maddening, that you’re sweet … I don’t know, I guess I’d say that you’re audacious. Vivid. I’d say you were vivid.”
‘“Would you say that I was a hopeful person?”
‘“Of course. Hopeful, yes …”
‘“I’ve always thought so. But what I’m discovering is that most people who think they live in hope are really desperate while those who admit to despair are quietly operating under hope. Case in point, I present myself an optimist, a sanguine, and yet what I truly am is a desperate person in convincing disguise. Most Pollyannas are, of course. Truth is skittish as quicksilver and I, for one, hardly know what was or is my own truth. Or if I have one and if I do, will it still be true in an hour? That was until this afternoon.”
‘“This afternoon?”
‘“Umberto, he proposed something to me. An idea which, well … a possibility which … were it to become … well, it would change everything. I’m old, Paolina, and I trust there’s time for me to grow yet older. Yet older or younger, I can’t say which, though my sense, as of this afternoon, is the latter. In any case, there’s something I’d like to do. And my knowing what it is I’d like to do makes me fortunate. Pollyanna is nowhere in sight, Paolina, it’s only me sitting here saying all of this to you. And I’m telling the truth.”
‘“But what is it that you’re sitting here telling me … I still don’t …”
‘Carolina began laughing again and I – still not understanding and nearly past caring about her night-train confessions – laughed with her, bending forward in my chair, my arms twined about my stomach. I stayed like that, rocking my baby, and a moment passed before I realised it was only my own laugh that I heard. Carolina was suddenly grave.
‘“Paolina, from the deepest part of my heart I would like to invite you and your baby to come and live here with Umberto and Luigia and me. You know, to be a family with us. For always, Paolina. For always until, well, until you decide you’d like to live somewhere else …”
‘I didn’t say a word. I only looked at her. Searching now for clues from what she’d just been saying and not saying. What was it that Carolina “knew” she wanted? Was it to give me charity? To provide herself with diversion? Were my child and I to be some sort of mission to soothe her uneventful dotage? I felt suddenly disconnected from her and when she reached for me, I pulled away too brusquely.
‘“Umberto said you might respond this way.”
‘“Umberto? Do you mean to say that he knows about this …”
‘“I’ve already told you, Paolina. It was his idea. I’m sorry to admit it wasn’t mine.”
‘“Have you left off telling the truth already? Umberto, he hardly looks at me, he …”
‘“Paolina, Umberto is a Jesuit. Jesuits interpret, elucidate. Manipulate. A Jesuit believes in nothing so he is free to believe in everything and what you’re perceiving as his … his diffidence, well, it’s not that at all. What’s at work is his Jesuitness.”
‘“Does he think I won’t take proper care of my child, that I need …”
‘“No. No, Paolina. It’s we who need you. You’re Umberto’s canto libero. His magnum opus. He’s been your teacher since you were learning to read. He adores you as he would a little sister. It’s magis. More. You know Latin better than I. It’s his Jesuit’s need – no, his Jesuit’s obsession – to be more, to do more. He paces the four-hundred square metres of this old palazzo in agony for its emptiness. He’s begun scheming his remedies, though; among them is a program for seminarians in their final phase of study who, one or two at a time, would live and work here. All the better to understand the life of a parish priest in a small isolated town. He’s in Perugia this evening to beg funds from the Curia to transform two of the saloni downstairs into a nido for infants now that mothers are beginning to work outside the home. He has already found licensed teachers and nurses to oversee it and …”
‘“And so am I to be one of Umberto’s remedies for the squandered space? Is that …”
‘“How much reassurance do you need, Paolina? When he speaks of you, he speaks of grace … He says that you will grace our lives. And that we must strive to grace yours. An honourable intent, Paolina.”
‘“Yes, honourable, but …”
‘“Is it that you don’t wish to live here with us? Is it that? If so, I’ll simply tell Umberto and …”
‘“It’s not that. I don’t think it’s that. But it’s all so, so fraught. I guess that’s a good-enough word. I’d be expecting Vatican guards to storm the palazzo in the night … The idea is preposterous. My coming to live here with my fatherless child … it would be flying in the face of Mother Church, of Rome. Of the Curia. Of the San Severese.”
‘“Umberto is neither taking a wife nor entering, flagrantly, into sin. His behaviour is, well, I suppose I would call it Jesus-like. He’s opening the parish-house doors to what he considers to be his extended family. Every family has some eccentricity. Some anomaly …”
‘“Anomaly. A Jesuit’s word if ever I’ve heard one.”
‘We look at one another, taking turns shaking our heads, speaking only with our eyes until I say, “Carolina, I can’t think beyond the bishop and all those monsigneurs and …”
‘“Whatever else they may or may not be, they’re a troupe of gluttons at the Curia. You’ll win them over with your pastries, especially those little round pink-iced things with the marzipan cherries on top … what do you call them?”
‘“Cassetine.”
‘“When I was a girl in Rome, I went every afternoon with my friends to eat gelato at Muzzi. I remember the boys would forsake gelato for pastries, for one sort in particular which looked very much like your cassetine. In dialect, the boys called them ‘nuns’ breasts’. Pile a plate with those and, next to it, prop a little card identifying them. Written in dialect, of course. That should strike a note familiar enough to distract the old piggish knaves from fretting over who’s who in Umberto’s family.”
•
‘Earnest as an estate agent, Carolina led me through the farthest corners of the palazzo. Originally the sixteenth-century country residence of a minor branch of the noble Monaldeschi, it was a descendent of that clan who left the property – handsomely and honourably restored – to the Church during the years between the great wars. Though I’d been so often in one or another of the saloni and the library and, of late, in the cavern of a kitchen, I knew nothing of the true immensity of the place until that afternoon of wandering through it with Carolina. She’d begun by saying that I should choose whichever rooms pleased me most, but when we’d climbed to the third floor where she and Luigia were situated, she lingered longest, thrusting wide the windows in each room, opening her arms to the rooftops of San Severino and to the wheat and the olives trembling in the wind beyond.
‘“Ecco. Behold. Here you’ll have morning sun and …”
‘“What about the attic? Will you show me the attic?”
‘Leading the way up the shallow stone steps of a narrow corridor lit by small, high windows, she said she’d been up there only once, maybe twice, in all the years she’d lived in the house, that it would be hellish in summer under the beams, that surely all the rats in San Severino assembled there, that I was too damn tall to even stand up anywhere but right in the middle.
‘Nearly at the top of the stairs there was a door. “What’s in there?” I asked.
‘She told me it was for “storage”. An oddly small room considering the dimensions of the others, it might well have been where the women of the house were isolated during their confinements. “At least that’s what Umberto thinks,” she said. “A rather morbid idea …”
‘I opened the door to what would become my home for the next thirty-four years. The ceiling was high and vaulted, it’s one window was a door opening to a small balcony. The floor was made of marble laid down in a design like a carpet. Here I could be as together with them as I could be alone with my baby. I would paint it red, a clear pure red with a trace of blue to keep it soft: carmine.
•
‘On the agreed-upon moving day, Carolina and Luigia and I gathered together the things to be carried to the parish house: the baby’s trunk, my books and clothes, a gilt wooden lamp with a grey-and-white-striped abat-jour from my parents’ bedroom. Photos in silver frames and linens from my mother’s chest. The Bohemian crystal. I don’t remember that I took much else. At Carolina’s insistence, we set about covering the furniture with sheets, turning off the water, the gas, unplugging the appliances. “You’re moving house, Paolina, not just coming to us for a visit.” Having arranged transport with two of the men who sometimes worked at the parish house, she was impatient when they didn’t arrive on time and so we three began to walk the few cartons and sacks across the piazza and up the hill.
‘On one of the trips up to the parish house, Ferrucci the baker – just returning from delivering the second bake and seeing us with our arms full – stopped his white van and loaded us and our baggage into the floured, yeast-smelling space. Leaving Carolina and Luigia at the parish house, Ferrucci and I went back to my house to fetch the baby’s trunk, the books and then, rather than taking me directly back to the parish house, he asked if I’d like to ride along with him to Orvieto where he was to make the day’s last deliveries. A kind of sentimental journey it would be since, when I was in elementary school and friends with his son, Ferrucci would often take us with him on his afternoon delivery. So I’d known Ferrucci forever, the small, sturdy white-clad figure of him racing on his wooden clogs into the shops and the trattorie, a brown paper sack of new bread in his embrace, shouting his arrival: pane caldo, pane caldo.
‘As though years had not passed since the last time we rode together, we drove up into Orvieto and, when he’d delivered his goods, he parked the truck in Piazza Duomo. Reaching under the seat, pulling out the half-kilo pagnotta he’d tucked away there, he slapped a clasp knife in my hand.
‘“Break it open, Paolina. I’ll be right back.”
‘I sawed the bread in two and, with the halves resting on my lap, I sat there high up in the truck, pinching off pieces of crust, thinking how, from time to time, life makes such small circles. Wielding a paper packet like a trophy, Ferrucci soon came racing back and, opening the door on my side, he stood there laying slices of wild fennel salame in perfectly overlapping circles over the bread. Pressing the pagnotta back together with the heel of his hand, he tore the giant sandwich in two.
‘“Andiamo.”
‘He led the way to the steps of the Duomo and we sat with our merindina, eating and smiling and feeling no need for words until, as we stood to leave, he said, “I can’t wait until your baby is old enough to ride in the truck with me. I can’t wait for that, Paolina.”
‘I looked at little Ferrucci in his white paper hat, eyes solemn behind glasses dusted in flour, more of it caked in the furrows of his cheeks.
‘“Anch’io, Ferruccino. I also can’t wait.”
‘I didn’t know back then nor do I now if Ferrucci, with his warm bread and his few words, meant to gift me my past and promise me a future. I think he did.
•
‘It was the last Saturday of that September. Having pilfered Umberto’s cherished Zenith radio from his study and set it on the bedside table in the little red room, Carolina sat feverishly twisting its dials. She’d been out in the shops that morning and had returned to find me installed up there in an early stage of labour.
‘“You must have distraction,” she kept repeating, though it was she who gasped and trembled while I sat folding and refolding baby clothes. She came upon some music and raised the volume. “Quando, quando, quando … When, when, when …” Uncorseted in her black woollen robe, still wearing her elastic stockings and town shoes, Carolina began to dance around the bed, making delicate samba-like moves, the pearl drops of her earrings jiggling in time with her bosoms.
‘“Amore mio, dance with me. Vieni, vieni, come, come.”
‘She took my hands, strove again and again to wrench the great white bulk of me from among the pillows and each time she failed. I fell to laughing and begged her to leave me be.
‘“Carolina, I hurt quite enough already without your …”
‘“But it’s this that will lessen the pain, you must move, move, move. When the contractions begin again, then you can be still. Come, try it.”
‘Carolina raised the volume just as Umberto entered the room.
‘“I heard the music … Paolina, is there something I can …?”
‘“Ah, Umberto. Maybe she’ll listen to you. Tell her that she must move, she must dance. Did I ever tell you that Anna-Rosa danced me through seventeen hours of travaglio before you were born? Yes, la pizzica, la tarantella, la monferrina. I don’t remember a polka but …”
‘Umberto and I laughed at Carolina and the more we laughed the better she danced and, when she pulled at me another time, I got to my feet and tried to do as she was doing. I’d never tried to dance before that afternoon. Never once. A contraction interrupted my debut and I fell back onto the bed. Intense as it was, Carolina had been right: the pain seemed less. After a few moments, Quando, Quando having given way to Guantanamera, I was on my feet again while Umberto, shaken by his first gaze upon a woman in her labours, was in retreat.
‘“Umberto, don’t you dare to leave me alone with her; you take a turn now while I rest. Keep her moving. She’ll follow you. Forza, forza. Go, go.”
“Neither had Umberto danced in his life yet there he was, facing me, his feet apart as though to steady himself. Tall as a cypress and pitifully thin, lank blond hair falling in his eyes – blue and wide with terror behind his wire-rimmed spectacles – Umberto took me in his arms.
‘Heedless of the rhythm of Guantanamera, holding me in the formal stiff position of a waltz, his lower torso arched slightly backward to accommodate my belly, I danced barefoot with Umberto the Jesuit in the small red room under the black-beamed vault, the breeze from the open balcony door ruffling his Nordic hair, shivering the hem of my nightdress. No genius with a chisel and a stone could have carved such a moment.
‘Carmine. Khar’-meen-eh. A beautiful word, don’t you think? My son was born on Sunday morning. Carmine Domenica. Carmine Sunday. All my sons were born in that red room and I named all of them Carmine. Carmine Mezzanotte, Carmine Midnight. Carmine Pioviggine, Carmine Rain. And my last, my baby, he’s Carmine Rovescio. Born feet first, he’s Carmine Backwards.
‘But I’ve gone too far ahead, haven’t I? Back to that Saturday, that Sunday morning.
‘The midwife and Carolina having seen to my delivery, Doctor Ottaviano arrived in time to inspect my son and to congratulate me. I recall nothing save the dancing and the moment when Carolina laid my baby across my chest.
‘Later that morning it was Umberto who came softly into the red room, asked me if I might sit up a moment. There was something I should see out the long window he said. I did better than that. With Carmine asleep in my arms, I walked to the balcony door to see that twenty San Severese, perhaps more than that, were walking in a free-form procession from the piazza up the hill toward the parish house. Every one carried flowers or some sort of parcel. Ferrucci had his arms around a great paper sack of bread.
‘“Carmine’s first visitors,” Umberto said quietly.
‘Through the gates they came and gathered in the front garden under my balcony, waving, shouting, “Evviva Carmine Domenica. Long live Carmine Domenica.”
‘In both my hands I raised the baby above my head, held him there for all to see and the shouting mounted. Carmine slept. Carolina came huffing into the room and escorted us back to bed, saying that weeping and laughing as I was would sour my milk and leave my son to wail in agony. Umberto went to meet the delegation and returned with his arms full of flowers. Luigia brought in the bread and what looked like a small sack of sea salt.
‘“There’s a note,” Umberto said. “Shall I read it to you?”
Life is a search for beauty and so we bring flowers.
And what would a life be without tears? And so we bring salt.
And so he will never be hungry, we bring bread to your son, great loaves for him to share.
•
‘No one acknowledged Niccolò as Carmine’s father and neither did any one deny that he was. Discreetly and with grace, Niccolò came and went as a visitor to the parish house. Claiming no special rights and no one offering him such, his was a mostly behind-the-scenes presence. Still, Niccolò’s attendance rankled Umberto. Though not once – not then, not ever – did either of them openly indict the other, Niccolò and Umberto clenched jaws and crossed swords back then. And for the next thirty years – until Umberto died – they sustained those postures. I know, I’m going too fast again.
‘Carolina, Luigia, Umberto, Carmine and I lived well together, as though we had lived well together always. There was screaming and shouting and laughing and tenderness in what felt like just doses. Emotions expressed, offences pardoned, kindnesses repaid in spades, all of it a revelation to me who, to avoid Stasia’s dismay, had grown up so nimble a ghost.
‘An eternal tragicomic opera, the household never numbered fewer than ten at table, what with the comings and goings of Umberto’s colleagues from Rome and the outlying parishes and the two or three live-in seminarians whose tenures rotated once a year. Catechism classes, pre-nuptial courses, child-care programs and thrice-weekly medical clinics provided the house chorus. The darling protagonist was Carmine Domenica, and Carolina, Luigia and I were his devout concubines. Though he reserved his fondest attentions for me, he did not withold affection from the others. As soon as he could tumble himself from his crib in the night or the early morning, he would go to one or another of us in our beds, tuck himself into our arms. At breakfast time, the victor in whose bed he had slept would carry the sleepy-eyed Carmine triumphantly into the kitchen. Of course, Carmine was only the first of my sons.
‘There was a certain symmetry over the next nine years between the various residencies of the seminarians and my birthing three more babies. Coincidence. Chance. Providence. People still speculate and I am still Delphic. Opaque. Save to Carolina, I’ve never felt the need to speak of who fathered my sons any more than I felt the need to marry him. Them. Anyone. Whenever I faltered, Carolina could tell. She would say, “It won’t matter in the end. What will matter is that you’ve wanted these babies with your whole soul.”
‘Yes. My whole soul. But would that suffice? Would that compensate for the affliction I am imposing on my children? And even if my love – the love of all of us – is enough for them, how would they manage outside that door? The candied faces of the adults, the open torment of their mates …
‘“Remember what Umberto said at the beginning … always some anomaly … always a secret. A rune too old to read. We all get a cross, Paolina. Your children will have this one.”
‘“A mother who is known as la virginetta di San Severino.”
‘“They say it endearingly. You must know that.”
‘“I do. I do but …”
‘“What you’re really worried about is whether they will love you? Whether they will forgive you? Whether your sons will forgive you. It’s that, isn’t it?”
‘I couldn’t answer her for the tightness in my chest. I nodded, yes.
‘“They may neither love nor forgive you. Be clear about that risk. Of course, they may neither love nor forgive you no matter what you do or don’t do. Be clear about that risk as well. Love them, Paolina. And not for the sake of the love they might return. Parental love, by its nature, is one-sided. Unusual as you are and as are your choices, your risk of love not returned may be greater. But as I think about it, because you and your choices are unusual, you may very well be easier to love, easier to forgive. Who knows? In any case, it has a nice ring, don’t you think? La virginetta di San Severino.”
•
‘All through the years that followed, the story of la virginetta remained the pungent stuff of local folklore. Even so, the prattle it caused was mostly confined to a small, tireless cabal whose disdain seemed made more of envy than of righteousness. I think it was sexual titillation that must have fed the men who gossiped. I’d never been a beauty. There was no prettiness about me to fade. And yet my femininity, my femaleness, grew more potent over time, that particular manner of moving and speaking and gesturing, of thinking and operating which is hardly generic among women and has not a thing to do with mincing or sashaying or the batting of eyelashes. I was strong and whole and peaceful and without any need of them and thus I was seductive. I bewitched them with indifference. Politely spurning their overtures – both subtle and not – I caused their hostility, their umbrage.
‘The women’s malice was made of another kind of envy. Unlike many of theirs, my life was never cluttered with angst over marital fidelity. I was never beaten or threatened or – most beautiful of all to contemplate – I was never lied to. There was, unfailingly, the little leather purse, fat with lire for the week’s expenses, waiting on the kitchen table on Friday morning. A white envelope, often with a flower or a branch of herbs tucked inside it along with a generous sum of argent de poche, was slipped under the door of the little red room on the twenty-seventh of each month. Who knows how such a personal event could have made it to the piazza? And who knows how many other personal events, less real than that, also made it to the piazza?
‘In winter I went to mass in a brown felt cloche with black velvet roses sewn along one side of it and wore a brown serge dress and matching coat. If it was cold, I wore a short silver fox cape. In summer my dress was of navy silk, a wisp of a thing no heavier than a handkerchief. My cloche was straw. When Umberto had business in Orvieto or Terni or Rome, my sons and I would ride along in his black Giulietta; I in front next to Umberto, the boys in back. As I’ve said, we all lived well together. More like a family or less like one, I can hardly tell you which it was.
‘With the shelter – and, I suppose, the prestige – of life in the parish house, my sons managed their crosses and my mystery. Not always but often enough, they managed. There were even times when I believed they thrived on the unconventional circumstances of their childhood. In a way, they set a new standard by their living with the local priest, the priest’s mother, the priest’s aunt. And by their sitting at lunch and supper every day with seminarians who taught them Greek and Latin from the time they could speak and coached them in soccer and sang the Georgics to them before they slept and accompanied them across the piazza to and from school, their long black soutanes a uniform more majestic than a father’s brown corduroy suit, my sons were elevated from their mates, their pain and embarrassment camouflaged so that their lives looked and, I think, felt ordinary. Ordinariness being the state for which children long more than all others.
‘They look like me, my sons do. Tawny skin and hair black as a raven’s, snub noses and good teeth. But their eyes are my mother’s: slanted, green, iridescent as the neck of a pheasant. Never a day goes by without my thinking of her, she being there in my sons’ eyes. Have I told you? Three are farmers who work the same land my father did. Niccolò’s farms. Carmine Domenica is a paediatrician. They are all married and they are all fathers. They are the loves of my life. And who am I to them?’
Paolina is quiet now, sits up, pulls her shawl tighter, knots it, takes the cigarette tin from her pocket but doesn’t open it.
‘I would like to eat something. To drink some wine. Let’s go back. Always something to rummage in the rustico.’
‘The chocolate in my auto, it will stave off … I mean, until aperitivi. It must be …’
‘The light’s still greenish, not yet four, I’d say.’
Lithe as a geisha, Paolina shifts her weight to one knee then rises, grows up, tall and straight, from the weeds. She pulls me to my feet.
‘I want more than chocolate.’
‘I know. Bread and wine and oil.’
She lights the fire while I put back in place the things she’d moved before scrubbing the floor. Washing our hands at the kitchen sink with a slice of Miranda’s private stash of clove-scented soap, which Gilda makes, Paolina says, ‘How could I know, my sons, what they really think and feel? Do they talk to one another about … about the uniqueness of our lives? About me? Niccolò and Umberto were the men, constant, in their lives. As less than fathers, more than fathers, each one gave the boys what the other one couldn’t. Umberto – bashful, studious, tender, wise, teaching, talking, endlessly talking to them, trusting them, even as tiny boys, with pieces of his own conundrums about right and wrong, good and evil. Niccolò was, remains their vigor, their laughter. As Miranda says of him, Nicò is an old oak. Tenacious, immutable. How strange, though, that the four are mine, resemble me, one another, Stasia. As though the others didn’t.’
‘Be careful or Miranda will accuse you of being prone to visions, la virginetta di San Severino.’
With a jar of Miranda’s preserved pears on the floor between us, we sit by the fire, pull the fruit from its syrup, each with her knife, slice the fruit, wet the slices in tumblers of red.
‘Great, deep lacunae you’ve left, Paolina. Did you mean to do that?’
‘Have I? I suppose. I … I went to the end, or almost to the end, as though you should know or remember what happened in between. As though surely I must have already told you. I think I have if only in my thoughts. Come to think of it, I’ve never even told myself the all of it. I don’t know if I could.’
She looks away, then down, making a long, awkward show of slicing another pear. ‘Is it about the men I’ve known? Are those the empty spaces you’re wondering about?’
‘Some of them.’
‘Some of which? The men or the spaces?’
Questions that want no answer, I drink my wine. Screw the lid back onto the jar of pears. ‘Shall I get us a candle?’
As though she hasn’t heard me, Paolina says, ‘Save his seed, I never needed anything a man might give to me. Or it might have been that I never needed anything more than what had already been mine with a man. With men. You see, I dreaded love more than I coveted it. It seemed enough to me to know that love existed. I lived my loves in scenes brief, perfect, unstained. With Niccolò. With others. Like when I danced with Umberto. Those were enough. I don’t think I could have managed a cup any fuller. No, I don’t think I ever wanted more than what was in mine.’
‘You sound like a Franciscan.’
‘The Franciscan impulse is purity. Mine was foreboding. I feared ruining a love by wanting it to be more than it was, more than it could be. Love seemed a devouring thing that must, perforce, grope its way always deeper into the beloved, finally throttling him, her. Niccolò believed that and, hence, all those years ago he refused the risk of exclusivity. And so avoided the death of love.
‘And then there was my fear about wanting a man more than he would want me. We do seem to want them more than they want us, don’t you think? Over the years one can’t help but witness, here and there, how women are wont to chase after love, to beg for it, to try and earn it. I preferred to stay aloof. To keep love a stranger. But what I feared even more than begging a man to love me was that I might hurt a man I loved. Causing the beloved pain is the precursor to hating him, hate being easier to bear than guilt. That’s what happened between my mother and father. I’m sure of it. Then the process of discarding the beloved begins. The casting aside.’
Paolina says this last phrase in English. The casting aside. She repeats it in a faraway voice.
‘I love that English verb – to cast. I learned it a long time ago when … when a friend, a friend of Umberto’s … when he was teaching Domenica to fish for mullet in the lake of Bolsena. He – this friend – had learned English in Boston. Boston College, I think that was where he studied.’
‘A fine Jesuit school,’ I say, implying a connection to Umberto’s seminarists. She concedes the innuendo but only halfway. I get up to fetch a candle, light it from a hearth flame.
‘Yes, this friend was, indeed, a Jesuit. In any case, he decided that Domenica should learn to speak English while he was learning to fish. “And now, Domenica, watch the movement of my arm as I cast my line.” To cast. To cast aside. To cast away. I remember sitting there a bit behind where the two of them were standing. I would repeat the English words so that I could help Domenica to remember them later. From “to cast”, it was an easy jump back to Italian – castigo. Punishment. Yes, one punishes the beloved – casts him aside – because one has wronged him. And when one is free of him, one strives to begin the process again with the next “beloved”. Love, pain, hate, the casting aside. No, I would stay aloof.’
‘I take it back. You’re not a Fransiscan. Pure Jesuit you are, Paolina. Rationale, suspicion, theory, not even a Jesuit can apply logic to love, though. I don’t believe it’s you who’s kept love a stranger. Love goes where it will. It may yet come to call on you.’
Paolina laughs, if without mirth, and I look at her, begin speaking in a sing-song parody of her voice: No, I would stay aloof. I preferred to keep love a stranger … She begins to really laugh then and I continue, mercilessly, to mimic her until we’re both supine and breathless.
‘Haughty Jesuit,’ I say, sitting up to stir the fire.
‘Haughty Jesuit,’ she repeats as though the allegation intrigues her. As though she’s never considered herself a ‘pure’ Jesuit, complete with rationale and suspicion and theory.
‘So it’s not too late, then. I mean, for me to …’
‘Who knows, Paolina?’
Her laugh is dreamy. Pulling the elastic from her hair, she rebinds it, repeats the two steps.
‘It’s been half a lifetime since I’ve even tried to imagine what it would be like not to be alone …’
‘Who ever said that love staves off aloneless? You might very well be in love and be still alone. Many of us are. I don’t necessarily disagree any more than I agree with all your Jesuitness regarding love. I am only suggesting it’s moot until love decides to have its way with you. Basta. Now what I want to know is, how did you come to be Umberto’s cook?’
‘That’s easy. My little Beppa.’
‘Beppa?’
•
‘From the first day when I settled into the small red room, I dearly wished to earn my keep in the parish house. I wanted to work in the kitchen,’ Paolina says. ‘I opened the subject with Carolina. Before I’d even finished presenting my case, she was already bent on distracting me.’
‘“Ma tesoro, wouldn’t it be lovelier to work in the gardens?” she said. “Once the baby is born we could set its cradle under the olives or in the saddle of one of the oaks.”
‘I said I would prefer to set his cradle on the work table where we could see one another while I mixed the bread or …
Cringing, she said, “I’ll speak to Beppa.”
‘“Maria-Giuseppa, ‘Beppa’, a widow past seventy, her old weeds faded from black to bronze, her hair so red it showed purple in the sunlight, Beppa walked into town from a neighbouring commune every morning to cook for Umberto and had done so since he’d come to live there. Her devotion to Umberto’s supper was the fundamental substance of Beppa’s life. And when Carolina arrived and then Luigia, Beppa dug her stick deeper into the lines around her dominion. The parish house kitchen was hers.
‘Her body frail, her grit titanic, Beppa was famous for ravaging the shops, steering her wheeled plastic cart, string bags flapping on her wrists, negotiating with the merchants for every banana and stalk of parsley. Fierce as a scavenging bird, she would swoop upon the wilted, the withered, the perishing, demanding them for a pittance. Only meat and fish must be of exquisite quality and worthy of Umberto’s lire. Trusting to no one for eggs, she brought them each morning, warm from her own hens, wrapped in newspaper. She baked bread every other day. These elements gave Beppa a certain culinary independence so that, with a few wild herbs from the imperishable stash in her pockets, the barrel of good oil in the pantry, the little jars and bottles of things she’d conserved in the summer, Beppa could perform a daily rendering of Loaves and Fishes. Thus, in the shops she could be ruthless, repeating ad infinitum to the merchants that the food she was gathering was to nourish God’s own disciple and weren’t they ashamed to take profit from the pocket of God himself. With equal repetition the merchants would roll their eyes, saying if only they could eat and drink with the abandon of the clergy: ‘“Magari, fosse vero, if only it were true.”
‘Beppa’s loyalty to her cause was unshakeable. Even before she would unpack her cart, she would march – her pigeon-toed step bouncing in jubilation – into Umberto’s study. Under his desk lamp, she would tuck the morning’s receipts wrapped around his change, patting flat the edges of the paper, smoothing the doily over it, her gestures as tender as Umberto’s when he anointed a baby with chrism. Only then would she set to work.
‘First Beppa would take stock of what she called her caveau. Her safe. A shelf in the refrigerator, forbidden to the householders, it was where she stashed her treasures: a precious half a litre of reduced broth; a cup or two of cooked white beans; pasta, cooked and undressed; dripping caught from roasting meat; a few spoonsful of one sauce or another; a heel of bread; the crusts from an aged cheese. In part, Beppa’s menu was always based on the menu from the day before. An expression of frugality, her ritual saving was a kind of insurance stringing the house meals together, each supper promising there would be another one tomorrow.
‘Not unlike a French cook who dips daily into a cassoulet that has sat on the back burner for twenty years or more, replenishing her withdrawals with fresh elements and mixing them together with the old so that her pot never empties,’ I say. So did Beppa operate her kitchen.
‘Whether cooking for two or fifty, Beppa’s culinary battery was as scarce as it was sacrosanct: one knife, a great heavy pot, a sauté pan, a medium saucepan, three or four terracotta dishes for the oven, a slab of polished olivewood for a cutting board, one of marble for rolling pasta with a litre-size wine bottle, two ladles and a stoneware pitcher full of wooden spoons, all her exclusive property. And she liked to be alone in her kitchen, Beppa did. When Carolina told her of my desired “apprenticeship”, suggested that, henceforth, I would be there to help her for a part of each morning, Beppa had turned from the pot she’d been stirring, ripped off her pinafore, started in weeping and howling. “Ringraziamento, gratitude,” she’d sobbed over and over until Umberto came running in to quiet her.
‘“Beppina, amore mio, you are not being disenthroned but honoured. Don’t you see that? Paolina wants to learn from you.”
‘Neither Carolina nor Umberto would prevail. Beppa dug her stick deeper yet into the dirt. I decided to try devices of my own.
‘Next morning when she arrived, she found me in front of the burners frying sweet rice fritters.
‘“Sorpresa. Surprise,” I said and pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table. “Facciamo colazione insieme, let’s have breakfast together,” I chirped as though the fritters and I would be welcome gifts.
‘Saying not a word, Beppa allowed me to ease her into a chair, to pour her caffé. Sliding the sugar bowl to her, I said, “There was some cooked rice in the fridge and an egg and … well, I thought I’d just mix up a dose of batter and …”
‘“One doesn’t make sweet fritters with rice cooked in water. It must be cooked in milk.”
‘“Of course, well, I … I guess I didn’t know that but, well …”
‘I pulled a tiny pyramid of fritters from the oven where I’d been keeping them warm, set the plate before her and went back to the business of frying the rest. I kept my back to her. When finally I turned around, she was daintily snaffling the second from the last one.
‘“Sono buone. They’re good. A suspicion of cinnamon would have helped. If you’d thinned the batter with half a glass of white wine they might have almost been right. If there’s milk, I’ll cook some rice before I leave. We’ll make fritelle together tomorrow. And never use that saucepan for frying. Mai più. Never again.”
‘“Never. Never, Beppa.”
‘I ran out into the garden and, prancing in raptures among the flowers, my arms tight around my belly, I kept thinking back to that day with Niccolò’s tomatoes. And now, with Beppina … how much more I would learn.
‘A brooder who rarely spoke save to mock and torment the merchants, Beppa was. But almost from the beginning of my tenure in her kitchen, she barely took a breath from her stories: memories, affirmations, revelations, mostly culinary.
‘I think my favourite was the one about her birth. Beppa said she was born lucky. A sixteen-year-old sharecropper, her mother had been digging potatoes when a colossal pain rent her back, kidney to kidney. But, digging potatoes, one always had pain, her mother thought. And, anyway, the baby wasn’t due for a month or more. And so Beppa was birthed in a potato field directly onto the rich black soil of Umbria. She and her mother were carried then to lie in the shade of an umbrella pine while the other women wet aprons and kerchiefs in the cool white wine from their lunch baskets and washed mother and child. They set Beppa to suck. The women fed her mother a pap of bread and wine and wild sage and sat with she and Beppa in a circle under the tree. Beppa’s mother said the women sang and passed bread and onions and cheese to one another and drank their wine and told their own stories about birthing. They said the potatoes could wait until sunset, until Beppa and her mother had rested and the men came in from the farther fields with a wagon to take them home.
‘Beppa would go quiet then, allowing herself to see the scene as her mother had described it. And then she’d get around to talking about the soup, the potion, the countrywomen fed to her mother: “Millennial elixir of the country people, as good for dying as it is for birthing, for healing heartache, nourishing joy, for calming pain. I’m happy when I’m bending in the meadows to gather herbs, to carry the fine-smelling things home in my pockets, to tear them then into a pot of good fresh water and let them heat and steep before I crumble in a heft of yesterday’s bread. It’s another kind of mass, the ceremony of ladling the broth into a bowl over a new-laid egg. The broth warms the egg, poaches it to a soft tremor and then, with a big spoon, one breaks the yolk, stirs it once or twice. Consoling. Yes, the little soup tastes of consolation. Don’t you think mine was the most beautiful way for a baby to come into the world?”
‘Each time Beppa told the story, she would end it with the same question: “Could anything be better, Paolina? Don’t you think mine was the most beautiful way for a baby to come into the world?” And then, answering it herself, she would say: “Oh, it was, Paolina. That it was.”
‘I’m certain that the story of her birth shaped Beppa, that it formed her security, her self-worth, that it shaped everything about her, from how she cooked to how she made love to how she raised her children. Life to Beppa was the opportunity to take her turn in the ancient pageant of Umbrian tradition, abiding the spoken and silent ways and means her forebears had abided. Never wanting more than her portion nor would Beppa have accepted less than it. Beppa was born Umbrian.
‘Also you were born, Umbrian,’ I say to Paolina.
‘I was. But my family – mostly my mother, I think – had been robbed of Beppa’s sense of primal contentment with life. Like others of their generation, my parents were driven by other notions. The epic rural family with its miseries and its comforts perished with the end of the Second World War. Most of the sharecroppers escaped from the countryside to the fresh torments of urban factories. Happiness is, very often, a new set of problems. But even for those who stayed to work the land in the fifties and sixties, rural life was never quite the same. The greater world had chinked away at, and corrupted, the farmers’ devotion to heritage and ritual. Beppina was one of the last of the tribe of genuine traditionalists. Miranda is another one. Gilda and Ninuccia, too, if in other expressions than Miranda’s and Beppa’s. I’m not of their ilk, though I wish I were and try to be. I think of Beppa’s stories so often it’s almost as though they’re my own. She would like that. I know she would. As long as I knew Beppina – and that was for nineteen years, until the day she died – her fortune never ceased to astonish her. I have always sought to be astonished by my own.’
I rise to tidy up what few things we’ve used. Now that we’ve broken its seal, I bring what’s left in the jar of pears out to the cheese hut where its cooler. When I come back inside, Paolina is on her way out the door.
‘Where are you off …?’
‘Going up to Bazzica to use the phone. Niccolò will be home by now. Fernando, too, I would think. I’ll call Ninuccia and she’ll do the rest.’
‘What rest?’
‘Tell everyone to come here. Miranda and Filiberto and Gilda and Iacovo … I’d much rather have some little supper here than go out this evening. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Beppa’s soup?’
‘I think that was it. I’ll be right back. Maybe Signora Bazzica has some eggs.’
I throw a lit match onto the wood and coal and crumpled newsprint that Miranda has layered into her old iron stove. Fanning the fire into life, I move the heavy iron plate halfway over the pot hole. I laugh to myself, thinking of the era when I moved on the line in front of all those eight- and ten-burner Wolfs and Vikings, shaking sauté pans, distilling broths, splashing in some wine, a little butter for gloss. Swirl and pour. Two donalds under the lights – two orders of duck, waiting to be served. Now, all those lifetimes later, I am here in a strange little dwelling a few kilometres beyond nowhere in a kitchen with a bedsheet curtain, coaxing the flames in a hundred-year-old stove over which I’ll boil water and herbs into a soup on a Saturday night in Umbria.
It will want most of an hour before the stove is hot enough and so I look about for something to do meanwhile. Even though there’s a great sheaf of sage hanging, half dried, by the kitchen door, I stick a candle in a lantern, and wander back out into the meadow to look for a few fresh leaves. I think of the soup Niccolò fed to Paolina when she was grieving and of the soup Ninuccia’s mother-in-law made with stones in the desolation of the Aspromonte. Of the pap Beppa’s mother was fed under the umbrella pine. Acquacotta. Cooked water. Tonight I will ladle it out for an assortment of old-guard Umbrian countrywomen and some of their men, none of whom wear Alaïa extra-small or Gucci loafers with no socks. I, too, am astonished by my fortune.
When I return to the rustico with a pocketful of herbs, Paolina is there. I see that she has been crying.
‘What is it? What …?’
‘Everything’s fine. I stayed with Signora Bazzica until Ninuccia telephoned me back. You know, after she’d called the others. Signora Bazzica had seven eggs from this morning. Eight left from yesterday. She put them all in the same sack so we won’t know who will get the day-old ones. Everyone’s coming. Everyone’s bringing something. Ninuccia was happy. Niccolò and Fernando have already gone to fetch Miranda and will stop by for Gilda. They’ll all be here within the hour. I’ll make a dolce. You make the soup.’
Who knows why but her tears bring on mine and we stand there weeping and smiling, taking turns starting and stopping to speak until Paolina says,
‘So it’s the ending you don’t yet know. Only that. The various endings.’
‘Paolina …’
‘I want to hear the ending myself. I want to hear it, yet I don’t know my way in the place beyond words. For myself more than for you, I will go there. I’ll try.’
Paolina walks about the kitchen, pulling out the elements she’ll need for the dolce. She scrubs the wooden table, dries it vigorously, dries it again, measures flour directly onto it, forms a well in the flour. With the tips of her fingers she begins mixing in butter, sugar, egg yolk, milk. She salts the mass with a marble-shooter’s flick and mixes again. Her hands fly over the mass, touching it but almost not touching it and, in less than a minute, she forms a satiny paste, slaps it into a flat, perfect oval and covers it gently with a fresh white cloth. She pats the cloth. She looks up at me.
‘It’s as though I’d spent my whole life with Umberto and Carolina. Thirty-four years if we speak in linear time. But in a real way I live with them still. Nothing maudlin, nothing macabre, what I mean is that I think many of us tend to live always in whatever was the best period of our lives. We set up the next epoch, wittingly or not, by re-creating the earlier one, the golden one. And my sons have done the same; their households reflect how we lived together in the parish house: open doors, long tables, endless suppers, fiery discussions with not a whiff of taboo, a peculiar alchemy of rules and liberty, communal esteem. Trials made us stronger. A true test of family.’
A bowl of old bruised figs is in the armoire. Shooing away the fruit flies, I dump them out on a space near where Paolina has just worked, scoop out their flesh, add black sugar and vin santo. I have no idea what we’ll do with it but I need to keep working through what must be three or four minutes of Paolina’s silence. She washes her hands, makes room for me at the sink, hands me a towel.
‘Luigia went back to live in Rome. I think it was just after Pioggia was born. She was failing and she chose to do so privately, making a grand appearance on the first Sunday of each month when Umberto’s driver would go to fetch her. We’d run to the front garden to meet the old black Chrysler. We’d pull her gently from her prop of yellow cushions, taking care not to crush the two green- and silver-wrapped packages that the pastrybaker at Muzzi would loop over each of her wrists. He told us once how she would walk away after he performed this service, stiff as a soldier, arms held out like wings so as not to disturb her sugary loot and go then to stand in front of the shop to wait for Umberto’s driver. She wasn’t there on the sidewalk at Muzzi one Sunday. Luigia died in her sleep, just as she’d always said she would.
‘The boys were fifteen, thirteen, ten and six when Carolina died. The love between their nonna and my sons was an epic love, a reciprocal adoration. Retrieving a ritual that had fallen out of vogue for generations, the San Severese – en masse and to the haunting drone of a lone Abruzzese piper – walked behind Carolina’s hearse from the parish house through the narrow streets of the village, across the piazza and to the church. After mass we carried her casket together, Domenica, Mezzanotte, Pioggia, Umberto and I. Roverscio rode, sobbing, atop Domenica’s shoulders.
‘I will try to tell you of Umberto’s passing. It was nearly six years ago, nearly six. He was at home and I was with him. The forewarnings of his leaving were not long. Not unlike my mother – though surely not in her manner – he dispensed with all notions of clinging to life. He’d stopped coming down to meals not more than a week before the evening when he asked me to sit with him until he slept. I did that. I closed his eyes, lit candles near his head and his feet, opened the windows and stayed with him until dawn. He’d left a box of letters for me, forty to be exact, written over the years, the last declaring – no commanding – his desire for a family celebration with nothing to mark his position in the Church. As I informed his colleagues of Umberto’s death, so did I inform them of his wishes. Neverminding the wishes and my plea to honour them, the Curia set about staging the pageant it deemed appropriate. I was of little strength to fight the Church and I admit to wavering, myself, about the wisdom of sending Umberto off with a country funeral. But Niccolò would not permit Umberto to be betrayed. Niccolò was Umberto’s cavalier. No fear of the Curia, Niccolò dictated and no one defied.
‘At the funeral mass, the bishop – dressed in a simple black soutane – sat in a remote corner of the church with a contingent of priests from Rome. He and they, not unnoticed. At the sound of the sanctus they walked in single file to the altar, waited their turn to receive the holy eucharist and then, forming a tight knot, they stayed together in the front of the church. When the mass was finished, the group moved swiftly to surround the bier, Niccolò and the boys, joining them with a precision that could only have been conspired. Over their bowed heads, the priest who’d said the mass, a newly ordained Fransiscan, waved the censer, raising it higher and higher, swinging it as if it were the bell to heaven and he would announce the arrival of his old mentor. Midst plumes of frankincense, the bishop and the priests, his life’s rival and his beloved ‘sons’, all together, they lifted Umberto the Jesuit to their shoulders. I did not bear Umberto’s coffin on my own shoulder as I had Carolina’s. I walked behind it. Like a daughter. Like a wife. The congregation were on their feet then and, in a rare, pure syntony, they began, slowly, powerfully, to applaud. During that long march down the aisle of the church, the scraps of odium that may have endured toward Umberto, toward me or any of his own, were washed away in the tears of the San Severese, obliterated in the unwavering beat of their hands. A family is made of love. Only sometimes is it also made of blood.’
Something she never does indoors, Paolina rolls two cigarettes, lights them, hands one to me, sits cross-legged by the hearth to wait the rising of her dough for the dolce. I sit beside her. We smoke in silence and without looking at one another. She rises then and I stay still. She walks toward the bedsheet curtain, pulls it aside and is about to pass behind it when I ask, ‘Will you?’
‘Accept him? I have always remembered, word for word, what he said to me on that long-ago day … He’d been right then. He’s right still. With nothing of spite or spleen, nothing of gall, this morning I told him, “Tesoro mio, ti voglio tanto bene ma io non mi sposarò mai. Mai. My darling, I love you but I will never marry. Never.”