The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  ‘End of that discussion,’ I say, knowing it’s the end of another one. We are quiet too long before we remember to laugh. But our laughter now has no music and so dies quickly, the foolish repartee impotent against the past where Miranda’s eyes still search. She adjusts her headdress, pinches her upper lip between thumb and forefinger, tilts her head to look at me.

  ‘Life’s a bungled hobble over thin ice, my love.’

  ‘Always thin, the ice?’

  ‘Mostly thin. Such a foolish sight we must be from some other vantage than our own as we leap, floe to floe, our gathered trifles – mostly worldly – weighing us down and causing much of the bungling.’

  As though she can see herself now – a lifetime of leaping, gathering, bungling – Miranda’s laugh is raucous, contagious and then my own parade of storms and passions marches before me and, through the strange broken old place on the verges of the Montefiescone Road, my laughing echoes hers.

  At last, gasping for air, Miranda says, ‘I say we should heed Orazio and prune back hopes for anything more than tonight’s supper. And you?’

  She’s on her feet and out the door to the gravel drive before I can shout, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To light the lantern. Miranda’s back in business for the evening and my truckers need to know. And to hell with the buckets and the rodent holes and will you please go to see what creatures might be hanging in the cheese hut and bring them here so we can get to work? But first, go to Bazzica and use the phone, get Fernando here.’

  ‘We’d already agreed that he would be here at seven so …’

  ‘Wonderful. And Filiberto … He’ll see the lantern lit and come to find out why, but you must still go to Bazzica to telephone Ninuccia. Tell her to bring her supper here and to call the others. They’ll all know what to do. ‘Vai, vai, go, go,’ she says, first hugging me close then heaving me away as she begins to topple down the tables stacked up along the walls by the nephews. Flapping her great lovely form about the place, she stops only to press the hem of her apron to the weepy midnight blue of her eyes, pulls down another table and another one, lining them up, wiping them down with a kitchen towel dipped in a rainwater bucket and I think that Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of Buonrespiro, is a queen bee in connubial frenzy. She stops in mid flight, looks at me, ‘How I miss him, Chou. I miss Filiberto who is real and I am decidedly not longing for the man I thought was Nilo and I’m thinking that the ice is good and hard this evening and that I’m hungry in my belly and my soul and how dearly I wish Orazio was here. And Barlozzo. Tell Ninuccia to bring a pack of Toscanelli.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Per ora, for now.’

  PART II

  NINUCCIA

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

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

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

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

  ‘Six years.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Have you been working with Ninuccia?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘What makes you think she …’

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

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

  ‘Did you just make that up?’

  ‘No. Thomas Hardy, I think it was.’

  ‘A friend of yours?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

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

  ‘More a despot than a storyteller …’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Talk to her, Chou.’

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

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

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

  ‘While I’m at what?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Would you speak to him then?’

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’ll telephone Miranda.’

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

  ‘Va benissimo.’

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘An ancient method.’ This is Gilda.

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

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

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

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

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