The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  ‘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 aperiti
vi. 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.”