The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  Very quietly, I take up the gauntlet that Miranda has thrown to me.

  ‘To inject the boar with the brandy. Syringe after syringe of brandy until the flesh is drenched, saturated. Rub the haunch with crushed juniper and let it sit for a few days. Some salt. Nothing else. Roasted over olive and grape woods, the natural sugars from the brandy seep out to form a brittle crust, which keeps the flesh lush. Pan juices. No sauce. The French roast sanglier in the same way.’

  ‘You were doing just fine until you brought in the French. Remember who taught them to cook,’ Miranda is saying to me over a chorus of, ‘Certo, certo, of course, of course … Once upon a time, we always roasted boar in that way.’

  ‘But who had brandy?’

  ‘And who had syringes?’

  ‘Grappa. Just make incisions, pour on the grappa and massage the beast. A little more grappa, another massage.’ This is Iacovo.

  ‘Brandy is what it wants,’ Miranda insists, ‘and only by injecting it can the brandy wet the flesh all the way through. You’ll have nothing on your plates but the boar, its crust and its juices. Afterward, a few leaves of whatever grasses I can still find in the meadow.’

  I listen and marvel yet again at Miranda’s understanding of the human condition. This brandy-boar-syringe act she calculated not to elevate me from the tribe but to include me. She knew that all of them knew what I knew, save two particulars. That I knew of the two particulars that they did not was instantly dispersed into their reminiscences. Without causing the barest nick in their Umbrian pride, Miranda might have managed to pull my chair a millimetre closer to the Thursday table.

  ‘And before?’ Ninuccia wants to know. ‘I think we should have nothing more than a simple soup …’

  ‘Only a simple soup – our usual refrain …’ This is Miranda.

  ‘Roasted chestnuts sautéed with wild mushrooms, pureed with bits of butter and a splash of cream.’ The boar story has enboldened me, though not enough to look directly at Ninuccia, who is already glaring at me. ‘We could mount a little more cream, perfume it with dry Marsala, a spoonful into each bowl. Let the cream melt into the hot velvety stuff. Ninuccia, please, just listen, just try to taste it in your mind before you … all the elements are at hand save, maybe, the Marsala … I mean, it is the right moment for …’

  Ninuccia’s open disdain causes the others to exaggerate their desire for this anything-but-simple soup and Miranda, tilting back again on the hind legs of her chair, is softly laughing.

  •

  Between the Thursday of her announced withdrawal from the burners and the very next Thursday’s farewell feast with the intoxicated boar, the sting of Miranda’s news had yet to be soothed. As we sat down together, it was a muted gaiety the tribe mustered: feeble chatter around a table of funeral meats for the sake of the widow. Neither did the cold winey cream meeting the hot faint smokiness of the soup bring forth half a sigh nor the gold char of the boar’s crust nor the exquisite drunkenness of its flesh. As though awaiting a dreaded train onto which only one of us would board – the great black thing having just hurtled into its berth – we linger, saying little. I could be the dancing bear who distracts them from their bile but I will not. Grown weary of what seems their selfishness, I just want the evening to end. We’d not yet cleared the table when the candles had spent themselves and it was by the last of the firelight that we rose – scorning Miranda’s plea to leave it all to her – and began carrying things behind the bedsheet curtain, excusing ourselves like strangers if we brushed by one another, reached at the same time for the same dish. So much for pulling my chair a millimetre closer to the Thursday table.

  ‘I need to be alone for a while. Some things I want to do without any of you underfoot. Be off, be gone.’

  The tribe bid one another buonanotte as though it was addio.

  All the way back into town I repeat and repeat what Andrè Gide taught me so long ago: If you want to discover new lands, you must consent to stay a very long time at sea.

  •

  It is late November – five weeks since the Thursday night of the boar – and Miranda and I are sitting midst the market-day fracas at Bar Duomo with our high-noon white wine.

  ‘They’ve been calling and stopping by and generally tormenting me, Chou,’ she says.

  ‘I know. They’ve been calling me as well. I’d not expected that. More I’d assumed they would begin arranging things among themselves, hoping I’d set off for Mars or wherever they think I came from. On that last Thursday, I’d felt it was me, the prospect of my becoming more present, that had caused them to be so sullen, so …’

  ‘How much you have yet to learn about Umbrians. Had they been anything but sullen, it would have been an afront to me, a form of disrespect. You saw and felt them to be unsympathetic. Cold. Both of which may or may not have been the case. They were being themselves. They were being Umbrian.’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘You cannot be Umbrian. Nor must you try. We are all eternally ourselves.’

  ‘Ditto. Touché.’

  ‘Who’s been telephoning you?’

  ‘It’s mostly Gilda who calls to say that when she passes by the rustico there’s no evidence of progress. Paolina calls, too, but just for a greeting. I’ve begun suggesting to both Gilda and Paolina that we meet at our place until the work is finished in the rustico but they baulk, say no one wants to drive up into town, look for a parking place, share the corso with tourists bemoaning the dearth of “lasagna” on every menu in centro storico.’

  Miranda laughs her goddess laugh and sips her wine. ‘It’s true. Country people tend toward listlessness after the day’s work and want nothing of town life to interrupt the tranquility of an evening. Most of us make the trek up onto the rock only on market days and then only if we have something to sell. They must be patient, our friends. Either patient or inclined to open their own homes for a Thursday night. Every one of them lives within decent striking distance to the others, wouldn’t you say? It would be only you who would have to drive a few extra kilometres. I should have thought to raise that possibility when we were all together.’

  She cracks a slender grissino and dips the piece into her wine, lets it fall delicately into her mouth, chews thoughtfully, shifting her gaze to two men who sit at a table to our right. In their market-day corduroy suits, freshly ironed shirts buttoned to their throats, black wool coppolas pulled to their brows, they are farmers whose wives are in the Piazza del Popolo bartering and selling the stuffs they’ve grown, harvested this morning before dawn and ported up into Orvieto. At last they can sit together to drink and smoke in santa pace, sainted peace. One of them holds a Toscanello between his lips, puts a match to its tip and, like a fish, makes short, quick puffs to set the grappa-soaked leaves aflame. He puffs, inhales, puffs some more until, at last, its smoke cuts the wine-laden air of the bar. Miranda closes her eyes.

  ‘All the men I’ve ever loved have smoked Toscanelli: my grandfather, my father, who knows how many uncles and cousins, the first boy who kissed me, my husband …’

  Without deciding to, I interrupt her. I say, ‘Barlozzo smoked them. Vanilla-scented.’

  She’s quiet for a long time, the Toscanello smoke having set her dreaming until, the spell broken, she looks at me, says, ‘As far as I can recall, this is the first you’ve spoken of your old duke since …’

  ‘Is it? Is it? I never intended to … I guess it’s only that …’

  ‘It’s only that you were in love with him and that makes it difficult, makes it …’

  She cuts short her thought, sips her wine, waits for me to speak. After a while I say, ‘I wish you had known Floriana.’

  ‘An artful foil. Deflect me with talk of his lover, will you?’

  Let me be, I beg her silently, knowing she won’t. At best, she will only shift recourse. If I won’t talk, Miranda will. ‘I find myself thinking about him,’ she says, ‘reminded of things he’d say, how he’d lope rather than walk in that right-sided tilt of hi
s, as though Aeolus walked on his left and he wanted nothing to do with the wind. Will you deny it?’

  ‘Deny that I loved Barlozzo? Why would I?’

  ‘That you were in love with him.’

  ‘Miranda, please …’

  ‘You’ve not been the same since, when was it? Nearly a year ago by now?’

  ‘In December. It will be a year in late December.’

  ‘Even widows shed their weeds after a year. Umbrian women, if not Sicilian. You two had – what shall I call it? – a kind of delerium of comradeship. Your affinity was complete and often exclusory. Even Fernando was superfluous, any fool could see that. As far as I know, Barlozzo was an anchorite before you came along and …’

  ‘You’re mistaken. Fernando excluded himself when his concentration wandered elsewhere, knowing he could re-enter our society at will. And as for the anchorite in Barlozzo, it’s true that he lived a long time as a recluse but his renaissance began when he and Flori began to spend time together. He loved her, Miranda, how he loved her, had always loved her since they were children.’

  I told her that we, Fernando and I, were background music, a fresh audience for his stories, the tales of his beloved patrimony. Consenting to his raging and blustering, his gestures of imperiousness, we knew he was fragile as a beaten child. To me, he was a tall, skinny boy with a small boy’s persistent hunger for caress. He could live on filched eggs, mostly raw, and great quantities of dubious red and if his pantry was bare save half a bushel of chestnuts, he’d invite us to dine, roasting the things, splashing them with wine so they’d go soft like pudding inside their shells. We’d salt the first batch and sugar the second. A two-course feast. ‘Non omnis moriar – I will die but not wholly.’ He quoted Horace like prayers.

  Sotto voce, Miranda says her own Horatian prayer: ‘Be wise and strain the wine for life is brief. Prune back hope. Even while we speak, envious time has passed; mistrust tomorrow and seize the day.’

  She takes my chin in her hand, looks at me hard and long. ‘Better to admit that you were in love with him.’

  During these past months I have been writing about our years in San Casciano. About Barlozzo. I think to an early passage in the text:

  A man they call Barlozzo appears to be the village chieftan, walking as he does up and down the tables, setting down plates, pouring wine, patting shoulders. Somewhere beyond seventy, Barlozzo is long and lean, his eyes so black they flicker up shards of silver. Gritty, he seems. Mesmeric. I will come to know those eyes, the way they soften to grey in the doom just before a storm, be it an act of God or some more personal tempest. His thick smooth hair is white and blond and announces that he is at once very young and very old. And for as long as I will know him, I will never be certain if time is pulling him backward or beckoning him ahead. A chronicler, a raconteur, a ghost. A mago is Barlozzo. He will become my muse, this old man, my animatore, the soul of things for me.

  Miranda breaks another breadstick in two, wets half in her wine. Holding it near her mouth, she says, ‘Whether or not you were in love with him, let him go. It’s time to let him go.’

  A parting gift, she hands me the wine-soaked piece of bread-stick, sips the heel of her wine, kisses the top of my bent head. ‘I’ll see you later, little one.’

  Worse than a Cassandra, my darling Miranda. How does she see, how can she know. Let him go? Not now. Not yet. I notice the breadstick still in my hand and so eat the limp, wet thing without tasting it. I ask for another glass of wine, move to a table closer to the farmers, all the better to take in the smoke of their Toscanelli. I let myself remember him saying:

  I stood up and began buttoning my jacket as he was looking down at some piece of paper, running his finger along a line of numbers and droning about statistics and therapies for multiple metastasis. In a voice louder than I’d meant to use I asked the doctor to tell me, plain and simple, how much time I would have if I just let things be. At first he seemed not to understand. He raised his head, sat back in his chair, stared at me as though wondering who I was. As though he was seeing me for the first time. Not a morbid festering mass of blood and bones but a man. Still a man. He waited a long time before he answered. ‘A year. More or less. I’d estimate a year, Signor Barlozzo.’

  The old duke had arranged two kitchen chairs under the stand of oaks behind his ruin of a house, his facing into the hot light of a straight-up sun, mine looking at him. Looking at him, I hear him, too, the soft baritone broken by a sigh now and then or a drag on his cigarette. At some point a while ago I’d stopped hearing the words, though. Stopped consenting to them. Silver swam in his great dark eyes and the long taut length of him was slouched, slanted in the chair, his spider legs crossed at the knee. He crushed the stub of a Camel against the green tin of an ashtray decorated with the Martini vermouth label. ‘I’ve never liked vermouth. Just ruins the good clean taste of gin,’ he would always say. He lit another cigarette.

  No noxious drenches, no carving away at my innards, no withering burns. Nothing. It’s not that I shall lie still and make it easy for the old Horseman. I shall fight him to the death, you see, duel with him, give him a fine game and, when I must, I shall surrender to him. But meanwhile I would like nothing better than to live this year in company with you and Fernando. Not in grief, mind you, not in mourning, not with you stepping lightly, pacifying desires and avoiding words and deeds which you deem unseemly. It is not a year in which I shall practise to die but one in which I shall live the rest of my life. Complete with all the sentiments and emotions and frailties and impulses which I suppose are the sum of it. I shall not take on new guises in the hopes of passing on more nobly. What and who I love, and what and who I don’t, have been fixed for a while now. And so the categories shall remain. I have no wish to walk along The Great Wall nor to see the sun rise over a pyramid. Above that meadow out there, day breaks red and yellow like the cleaved heart of a peach and, when the ewes have lambed, the spectacle is accompanied by their squealing and baa-ing and it’s then that I wish the whole world could be sitting here with me on this hill. I want a year of ordinary days, Chou. October days, November days. Rain in great fat splashes beating tunnels into the earth when it’s dry, thunder so fierce it stops your heart, I want to hold the new leaves on the vines in the palm of my hand. I don’t want different than what I have now. I don’t even want more. I’ve always thought the gods have been just with me. Always liked my portion of things. I shall receive this last one with open arms.

  No, I won’t let you go. How I miss you. And, yes, how I love you.

  •

  Later that same day, Miranda and I meet at the rustico. The once cracked and sagging floor tiles have been torn up to reveal a foundation of packed earth and stones, which Miranda’s nephews have covered, in part, with paint-dripped tarps and plastic sheeting and decorated, strategically, with buckets to catch the almost daily autumn rains that seep through the newly completed roof repairs. The cosy wreckage that was the rustico seems a desolate, ravaged place as we high-step through the tiny precinct, intent on conserving a windfall of pears from Ninuccia’s trees.

  ‘We’ll put everything right, you’ll see,’ Miranda chirps at me over her shoulder as I go about lighting fires in the hearth and the iron stove.

  Having stripe-peeled and poached four bushels of brown-skinned Boscs and bathed them in spiced red, Miranda and I are wiping down one-litre jars of the rubied fruit, stacking them on the shelves along with the fifty or so jars of other fruits and vegetables already saved for winter and spring Thursday suppers. Smoothing her pinafore, patting the pearly sweat from her forehead, she moves from the pantry back into the kitchen, and takes up a cleaver. She says, ‘Let’s get to the violenza.’

  In a basket on the work table there are perhaps a dozen heads of garlic, the purple colour of the cloves bright beneath papery skins. Slapping head after head with the flat of the cleaver, she scrapes the smashed, unpeeled cloves into a five-litre jug of new oil in which she’d earlier stuffed leaves
of wild sage, wild fennel flowers, rosemary, a fistful of crushed, very hot chillies. She is building one of her famous potions. Violence, she calls it. She uses it to gloss vegetables before tumbling them into the roasting pan, to massage loins of pork and the breasts and thighs of her own fat chickens, to drizzle over burning hot charcoaled beef and veal.

  ‘It’s good for everything but lamb and wild birds and the aches and pains of most men; though, more than once, I’ve rubbed it into a cut or a scrape, disinfecting the wound better than straight alcohol could and leaving a much more pleasing perfume on the skin.’

  ‘The aches and pains of most men? The ones they inflict or the ones they suffer?’

  ‘I guess I was thinking more about the ones they inflict.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve never married again?’

  Anticipating that Miranda would resume her talk of Barlozzo, I am prepared. I play offence. Her eyes cast downward, she tears the leaves off a branch of sage, pushes them through the neck of the bottle. I try again.

  ‘Is it? Is that why you’ve never married again?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Have you even considered it?’

  ‘Are you about to punish me for my ranting at you about Barlozzo? Is that …’

  ‘Punish? Hardly.’

  ‘Good, because … because I feel it’s my right, age has rights, in our case, a kind of mother’s right …’

  ‘Mostly, I saw Barlozzo as my child. Sometimes you see me as your child … we’re all trying to save someone when the most – no, the best – we can do might be to cook a good supper for each other and let life shape itself. I think that you were talking to yourself when you told me to “let him go”. I think there’s someone you’ve yet to let go. And like a mother, yes, like a mother, you don’t want what’s happened to you to happen to me. But I don’t need saving, Miranda, really I don’t.’