The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  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.”

  PART IV

  GILDA

  ‘GILDA AIDA MIMI-VIOLETTA ONOFRIO.’ GILDA SAYS THE name slowly, lingering on each vowel, rolling the r’s theatrically. She laughs, looks at me, repeats it. ‘I was fortunate tha
t my mother didn’t deem to put ciocio-san in there somewhere.’

  ‘Madame Butterfly?’

  ‘The same. Mamma was a soprano. Promising, from what I understand. Understood.’

  Gilda Aida Mimi-Violetta Onofrio. I try out the sound in my mind. For years she’s been simply Gilda. Not even a last name. I look at her now as she sits at the rustico work table in front of a four-kilo hill of fresh borlotti beans, her tiny white fingers flying over the pods, slitting them open with a thumbnail, turning out the red marbled beans into a large pot. Two of the dishes for tonight’s supper are being prepared by others, leaving little but the antipasto to Gilda and I. We’ll stew the beans with a faggot of rosemary and sage and a whole guanciale – dried pig cheek – cut into the finest dice and then smeared against the wooden table so it forms a rough paste. Once the beans are cooked we’ll pound the mass in a mortar with a pestle, adding drops of olive oil as we go. There are so many beans that we’ll each work on half the amount: Gilda with a wooden mortar and a marble pestle, I with a marble mortar and a wooden pestle. It’s the contrast between wood and stone that works best to smooth and crush. Some sea salt, a little more oil. The lush stuff is to be spread on potato focaccia, the dough for which I’ll mix now while Gilda finishes podding the beans. Cornmeal, rye and unbleached flours, mashed potato, white wine, a natural yeast made from grape and potato skins, which I’d left to ferment for a week or so. Sea salt and white wine. No water. My hands deep in the glutinous mass, I say Gilda’s name out loud now, repeat it in several tones and American accents. She likes it best when I say it with a Georgia twang. She tries saying it that way, too, but the sound she makes is more Smolensk than Atlanta.

  ‘Tell me about your mother,’ I say, without having decided I would.

  Immediately I regret my request, innocent as it was and inspired by her own reference to her mother. By blood and temperament, Umbrians are often reticent. Umbrage, shade, shadow, darkness, ghost. An uninvited guest. A man – hombre. All these words and images are derived from the Latin, umbraticum. A half-nod, a quiet buongiorno, buona sera, the occasional, come va? It’s these that suffice as social repertoire. In Umbria, it’s hard to find a rhapsodist whereas, for instance, in Naples, it’s hard to fine one who is not. As I’ve learned, the Thursday women can be exceptions; garrulous, rambling if it suits them, each one deciding for herself what she’ll declare, what she’ll withhold, to whom, when and if. Perhaps I’d risked invasion because, since the evening of the faulty gasoline gauge and the black velvet hat a year ago, Gilda and I have spent time together other than on Thursdays. We’ve taken to meeting at the markets, gone afterward to drink aperitivi and often she’s come to supper at our apartment with Miranda. I express my regret by recasting the question.

  ‘I mean, if it would please you … to tell me about her.’

  Gilda looks up from the beans, her lips arranged in a smile, her eyes far away. She shakes her shoulders. Feigns nonchalance. After a while, she says, ‘I think it would please me. To tell you about Magdalena.’

  ‘Magdalena?’

  ‘That’s her name. Was. Still is, I guess. My mother is Magdalena.’

  ‘Okay. Good, I mean, good as long as the telling is what you want to do.’

  ‘It is.’

  We both stay quiet then, each at our work and I think she might have meant that she’d like to tell me about her mother but not necessarily now. The only sounds in the old rustico are Gilda’s stripped beans hitting the cooking pot and my one-handed slapping of the dough against the bowl. I look at her looking down. A narrow, well-made, pale-skinned woman, the bones of her face strangely strong among all that delicateness.

  ‘As far as I know, that is. I can tell you only as far as that …’ she says by way of preamble, of apology I think. As though she might fear what she knows is not enough. ‘My mother was born in Orvieto, late in the life of her parents, adoring parents. Their own sun and moon, Magdalena was the darling of the Via del Duomo. Yes, in the street where you live, my mother was born.’

  Gilda smiles, a borlotto pod still in her hand, she flicks her hair away from the whisky eyes.

  ‘Not in your palazzo, though, but further up near the piazza.’

  ‘Still …’ I say, shaking my head, about to say something banal about how tiny is the world but stay quiet instead.

  ‘Yes, still,’ she agrees. ‘So, Magdalena. Even at seven and eight, her voice was eerily potent. Sometimes people still talk about my mother’s voice. About her. The neighbours would wait for her to sing, plan their tasks and outings around her practice times and, when she was, I think, eleven, some of them took turns walking her to Petrangeli palazzo in Via Malabranca. Up the eighty-six marble steps to the studio of a local maestro who wore a beret and smoked gold-papered cigarettes. Whenever she or my grandmother would tell the story they would always say that part – about the gold-papered cigarettes – in a whisper.

  ‘Camili was his name. And when Magdalena was fourteen – precisely fourteen – this Camili paid a call to my grandparents’ apartment, a beaver coat over his shoulders. He’d come to announce that he could do no more for their child. It was at Santa Cecilia in Rome where Magdalena must be trained. He’d already spoken with the director, already ‘arranged’ for her tuition to study at the famous academy. Only Neapolitans are better at ‘arranging’ things than Umbrians, but I suspect you’ve learned that by now. Who knows with whose soul Camili bartered for Magdalena’s scholarship, surely not his own. And so, at fourteen, Magdalena was packed off to live with her mother’s sister, also a woman of age, long a widow, childless. I, too, would one day live with that aunt, by then a perilously doddering old thing but … I’m not there yet, am I?

  ‘I know little of Magdalena’s story from that point. Safe to say, I think, her shift from cosseted princess of the Via del Duomo to struggling artist must have been violent, suddenly plunged as she was into a sea of talents formidable as her own. As the story went, Magdalena turned petulant. I suppose any princess would. And knowing the old zia as I eventually did, I can say that she would have been an unlikely pacifier, benumbed by life as she must have already been even then. She was of that ilk of Italian woman who abhorred the palest form of resistance to her will. Meeting it, she preferred to light another cigarette, unwrap another chocolate, say, to no one in particular, “Che cosa devo fa? What can I do?” Thus my mother kept her own counsel.

  ‘Proof – at seventeen Magdalena quit Santa Cecilia and announced her betrothal to a barista in Sant Eustachio. Gastone Pepucci he was called. When I was … after my mother passed away … after she was gone, I mean, you know, when I was old enough to understand, the aunt told me that there’d never been a wedding but I didn’t believe her. I still don’t. I found a dress in Magdalena’s trunk, it could only have been a wedding dress. There was nothing of photos but to what does that testify? Oversight, I’d say. In any case, I was born soon after … after the wedding or the elopement or … I was born soon after. And soon after that it was when Gastone Pepucci left Magdalena to seek better work in Milano or Switzerland. I’ve heard both versions. “Ostensibly to seek work” was a phrase still being bandied about by the aunt when I was old enough to wonder what it meant. I remember asking my mother, “Is Ostensibly a city in Switzerland?” She told me it was. I’m getting ahead again, I’m sorry.

  ‘I must have been only a few months old when Magdalena left the apartment she’d shared with Gastone Pepucci to return to the old aunt, baby and baggage in hand. I think Magdalena withheld both my presence and the absence of Gastone Pepucci from my grandparents in Orvieto, the old aunt having convinced my mother that would be best. Consequently, I never knew my grandparents. All the while that Magdalena and I lived together with the aunt, grandparents were never mentioned. Only years afterward did I even begin to wonder about them. Who were they, where were they, why weren’t we part of their lives, when did they die, what were their names? How can such estrangement happen in a family?

  ‘What with the pr
incess subdued in the still-adolescent Magdalena, the aunt, I can imagine the aunt, aloof, bovine, handing down embargoes and decrees upon my bewildered mother. That must have been the time when Magdalena began to sing almost incessantly, her voice haunting the small, fusty rooms of the aunt’s apartment. Puccini being the perfect accompaniment to despair, Magdalena sang him. I remember trying to echo her, forming my mouth the way she did hers, hunching my shoulders, closing my eyes. Magdalena would laugh, place a finger over my lips. “Your little pipes make the sound of a piccolo played in a tempest,” she would say.

  ‘Years passed with no word from Gastone Pepucci and, slowly, Magdalena withered, dying of some ethereal complaint, which might have been suicide. I was eight.

  ‘I remember her. Of course I do, if more as a drawing or a painting than flesh and bones. She was always there, but never there. Not all of her. Try as I would to make a conquest of her, to distract her from whatever or whomever it was that kept her away from me, to make her see me, to let me be enough, I never could. I can hear her singing, though. She left me that. That was real. My mother’s voice was real.’

  •

  Though Gilda and I never break stride in task after task while she speaks and I listen, the pace of her story is reluctant, dreamy. She grows silent now and then, taking time to search her thoughts, to weed, I think, until she’s ready to resume it, sustaining it with a kind of nimbleness if only for a while before she goes quiet again.