The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  ‘E poi, and then? What will be next?’

  ‘Loins of caramelised pork braised in more novello with …’ I hesitate again before saying, ‘with prunes and cloves and cinnamon and …’

  I look to Ninuccia, see her perplexity. This strange American; prunes with her pork? But it’s Paolina who saves me, she having sifted through childhood to find a memory.

  ‘I remember that my mother would make a braise of pork with dried prunes. And spices, too. Cinnamon. Surely she used cinnamon. But I don’t know if she cooked it in wine or broth. It must have been wine …’

  Now it’s Ninuccia who recalls: ‘I remember a neighbour woman who came to help each December when we slaughtered a pig. She was from Lubriano, or maybe it was Bagnoregio, but anyhow she would make a kind of sausage with trimmings and prunes and spices, shape the paste into ovals and fry them dark and crisp. We’d stand by the stove, my cousins and I, wait for her to stuff one or two between thin slices of bread. We’d grab them and run away fast as we could, out of the house and up into the woods, clutching the hot little parcels tight to our chests as though someone would try to steal them. How good they were. I don’t know why we always ran up into the woods with them rather than just inhale them on the spot. I wonder. I hadn’t thought about that in forty years.’

  I watch Miranda watching the others, listening to them, and I think she is content for this small exchange of memory and nostalgia. Miranda, too, must always have a story with her bread.

  ‘And then don’t you think we should have something with chestnuts?’ I ask. ‘Fried chestnut-flour cakes with raisins. And chestnuts cooked in spiced wine. The tastes of these are like a reprise of the pork … continuation. In fact, the little cakes and the drunken chestnuts could be served with the pork. It would all work together.’

  ‘Adesso, io ho fame. Now I’m hungry,’ says Ninuccia.

  ‘Anch’io. Me, too,’ says an old cousin who’d seated himself, prick-eared, at the end of the table with his tumbler and a pitcher of wine, intent on our homey discourse. Miranda shoos him away and, as he moves back toward his watch over the grinding stones, he turns around and says, ‘A Natale ci sposeremo. At Christmas, we’ll be married.’

  ‘Scemo, cretino.’ She calls him a fool, a cretin, her blush belying her pleasure.

  Everyone putters about clearing the table and washing up, each one saying what she’ll bring along to the mill later that evening or in the morning to contribute to the supper. I’m about to leave, too, when Ninuccia says, ‘Wait a bit, won’t you? Faccio un caffé,’ she says, riffling through a cupboard drawer for the parts to a Bialetti.

  I’m tired and want mostly to get home to Fernando and to a bath and a rest, to think about our own Thursday supper. But having found all the pieces to the little pot, she’s already packed it tightly with ground espresso, set it on the flame. I sit down again, take off my shawl and wonder – has she waited until now to tell me her impressions of the dishes I talked about? I am thinking that I do like this Ninuccia. And that maybe I do seek her friendship. Or is it Miranda’s powers of suggestion at work?

  An elbow on the table, I rest my chin in the hollow of my hand and watch her fussing about the cups and searching for sugar. A great mass of bound Titian hair, her skin is pale and freckled, the congregation of spots, heavy on her cheeks and across her nose, makes a coppery mask under eyes grey and soft as pussywillow; she might be an Irishwoman as soon as an Umbrian one. She is sixty-six, so she said not long ago, though she looks to be far younger, her small breasts high and proud under her sweater, her hips wide, muscular, hers is a body shaped by a life of physical labours. Pouring out the coffee, she sings softly in a minor key, the words in a dialect I don’t understand. She sits down across from me.

  ‘Did you know that I lived in Calabria when Pierangelo and I were first married?’

  I nod, yes, but I don’t speak.

  ‘Have you been there? Oh, I don’t mean to the beaches or …’

  ‘I’ve been in the mountains.’

  ‘Ah, well, then you know a bit how different it can be … there from here. Another country. Another world. It’s not as though I’d come from a wealthy home but, whatever we might have done without, our table was always full. Full enough. What I’m trying to say is that how I lived down there with Pierangelo and his mother and the others in that mountain village, well, that time left its mark. Not a scar, mind you, but an impact, still fresh. It shows in almost everything I do but, especially, it shows in how I cook. We Umbrians are mostly frugal, restrained – unlike the Emilians and the Lombards, for instance, or the Sicilians when they’ve the means to embroider. But it has become my nature to be … Spartan. I guess that’s the word. So I hope you’ll understand if I ask … don’t you think your menu is … well, let’s say that if the Sumptuary laws were still …’ She laughs rather than finishes her query. I am smiling, thinking how she is hardly the first person to accuse me of culinary lavishness. Ninuccia continues, ‘Una bontá, sicuramente, very good certainly but, Thursday suppers have always been, well, less themed, less formal, less complicated. Cosa c’e, c’e. You know, “What there is, there is”. That was my mother-in-law’s daily expression. Thrice daily. She could make supper out of sticks. I wonder if, in her whole life, she’d ever sat down to a supper like you’ve described.’

  ‘She, your mother-in-law, is she …’

  ‘She died a long time ago. When Pierangelo and I decided to move back up here to work my father’s farm, we begged her, begged and beseeched her to come with us but … Her home had a floor just like this one.’ Looking down, she pounds the toe of her boot onto the packed dirt. ‘Being poor in Calabria is akin to misery.’ Raising her eyes back to mine, she says, ‘She was very tall, dark-skinned, night-black eyes, so black they looked silver. Not big, her eyes, but long like wide slits of light in the smooth darkness of her face. Cosima, she was called.’

  ‘You are very much describing your husband. His eyes are …’

  ‘They are. Just like hers. Pierangelo Santacaterina. Such a name. Eleven syllables. I loved him instantly.’

  ‘Calabria, Umbria, how did you find one another?’

  ‘I was nearing twenty-five, a perilous age to be still a virgin since, back then, it was somewhere shy of thirty when una ragazza singola, an unmarried girl, was edged over into the rank of la zitella, an old maid. Not only had I yet to live a love story but, worse, I’d yet to dream one. I was too happy, too full being my parents’ child, my brother’s sister, my larger family’s preferita, their favourite.

  ‘Though I didn’t understand it then, my father worked toward this extended “adolescence” of mine. Subtly, he schemed to insure it: “The world is evil. Stay at home as long as you can.” He kept me tethered tight as a wayward goat but most fathers did in those days. Sometimes in their own interest, I admit. My father, though, he was gentle and proper as he was devoted.

  ‘He drove me to school in the ape and either he or my brother was there to fetch me when class ended. No matter where I went, someone from the family always went with me. As I think about it, they needn’t have bothered so much about me. I was plain and timid and awkward, a trio of barriers potent as black plague when it came to keeping the boys away. And by some standards, we were poor – that might have been the cherry. But I didn’t mind much. I was a pataciona, a big potato, mature in body, a little girl in spirit. I really don’t recall suffering for this sentimental exclusion by my peers. I do, however, remember that my maternal grandmother could make me cry.

  ‘Before every meal for the two summer months when she stayed with us, she would take the day’s pagnotta and go to sit in her chair by the spent hearth. Tucking the great loaf neatly under her chins, resting it like a violin on the shelf of her bosom, she’d slice at the bread in the exuberant sawing motions of capriccio – always toward her – the pieces falling into a basket she held tight between her knees. As though the feat itself were not enough of a spectacle, she also talked to me while she sawed: how
to fix my hair or my dress, when to wear the gold hoop earrings, when to wear the ones with little red stones. Was I washing my face with olive oil twice a week? The times I hated most, though, were when she would pull a length of butcher’s twine from her pocket, turn me to face the wall, stretch the string taut against my backside then hold out the length of it for me to see, tsk, tsking, saying, “And this is only half the circumference of those prosperous hips of yours, amore mio.” That damn piece of string haunted me. She’d pull it out once a week and put me through the same agony. She’d always end the event by saying, “Ninuccia, Ninuccia … all that white meat of yours.” Anyway, after what she’d sliced of the pagnotta for breakfast and lunch, there wasn’t so much left of the two-kilo loaf by suppertime. Still she sawed and still she talked until the heel of it hit the basket. She’d always close her performance with the same line: “It wants a rather particular sort to court a girl like you.”

  ‘It was she, this grandmother of mine, who made me feel odd and strange and unworthy. I might have borne those sensations for always save that, one afternoon, Pierangelo Santacaterina stopped by.’

  All this while as she was speaking, Ninuccia gazed up and down and beyond where we sat. Everywhere but at me. As though I was in a room nearby, the door ajar – clandestine, mute – she wanted me to hear her story rather than tell it to me. Neither a question nor an affirmation, she would suffer no hindrance to memory’s course. Ninuccia’s was a soliloquy.

  ‘I’d been weeding in the orto, barefoot, bent to the earth, skirt kilted to my hips, fairly blind from the sun. My first glimpse of him was upside down, between my legs. He scared me so I screeched and nearly fell over trying to right myself. Shading my eyes with both hands, I tried to see him, and asked: “Chi desidera? Who do you desire?” He laughed and shook his head and laughed again, finally saying he had an appointment with my father. I think I gestured to the house, “Si accomodi. Be comfortable.” I remember sliding my kerchief from my head, letting my hair down, wiping my face with that sweat-soaked thing, stumbling a few times before getting my feet to move in synchrony so I could run off toward the field where my father was working.

  But how did this Calabrian find his way to us? you must be wondering. Essentially it was via the clans. ’Ndrangheta. The Calabrian mafia. That is, the Calabrian mafia in its most delicate incarnation. As so many men – and boys, too – were and are wont to do in those parts, Pierangelo made his living doing the clans’ bidding. You see, a few days before Pierangelo’s appearance on the farm my father had been refused a loan at the Cassa di Risparmio in Orvieto. Bankers are often as diffident to modest desires as they are malleable to excessive ones. Pierangelo was entrenched in an unofficial partnership with the very banker who refused my father. This banker would purposefully decline requests for relatively small short-term loans and then send his “partner” – in the guise of an independent estimator – to view the needy person’s property or land or machinery, and, after lengthy deliberation, agree to lend the funds, if at a somewhat higher rate of interest than the bank’s. Distilled, Pierangelo and the banker were in league with a band of truffatori – swindlers, thieves, forgers, usurers. Having first put the banker in place, Pierangelo’s clan then sent him north to have a go at the Umbrian pigeons set up by the banker. That’s how Pierangelo Santacaterina came to Umbria. And for some mystical reason, which I have yet to comprehend, he wanted me: me, la pataciona.

  ‘After that first sighting – Pierangelo of me and I of him – the business of the loan turned to figment, pretext for his further visits to my father. I would pass through the salotto as they sat with their grappa and their discourse and station myself – skirt fanned, legs crossed in feint nonchalance – on the veranda to await his arrivals and departures. Much later would my father tell me that, on his second visit, Pierangelo Santacaterina asked him for my hand. Dismissing ritual queries and a decorous phase of observation, my father surrendered to the sufficiency of his instinct and to, what he perceived to be, the will of the Fates. My father told Pierangelo Santacaterina that he believed I was already his.

  ‘When he began to court me and spend Sundays at our place, everyone was all a titter. “Ninuccia ha un ragazzo. E che ragazzo, mamma mia.” As handsome as he is now, when he was twenty-five, he could stop your breath. Even my grandmother loved him. She began the butcher-string business with him, too, measuring not his backside but his shoulders and, as dismayed as she was with my measurement, that’s how thrilled she was with his. She took to measuring me with one string, he with another. Then she’d stretch the two strings, one against the other, demonstrating that they were just about equal: the breadth of Pierangelo’s shoulders and that of my backside. Ach. But I was speaking of Cosima, wasn’t I?

  ‘Pierangelo spoke often and lovingly of his mother. “She and home are the same thing for me. Now you and she are my home.” I’d never met Cosima until Pierangelo and I – married two days before in the town hall in Orvieto – made our way, in his heroic nineteen-year-old white Cinquecento, up into the isolation of the Aspromonte.

  ‘Aspromonte, bitter mountain. My husband had, at length and most candidly, spoken of the village where he was born and had always lived, enumerating on the fingers of both his hands the perils, the hardships, the dissimilarities between the modest idyll of my Umbrian life and the one I would meet in Acquapendente di Sopra, a village of sixty-three souls, “if no one’s died or been born since Christmas when I was last there”. Sixty-three souls, some of them damned, he said. Shaking my head, muffling his warning speeches with my hand or my mouth, all I wanted was him. But he would persist: “Many of the men stay down in the seaside villages to fish, selling their catch to the restaurants, only wandering back up to the mountains once a week for conjugal visits, to leave a wad of bills, often thin. When called upon they perform simple favours for the clans. Or more complex ones, as I did with the banker. But that’s over now. I’ll invent something else. No, of course not. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous.” As we withdrew that afternoon further into the wilderness, I began to feel a kind of qualm, mild enough at first before building to a tease, to a menace and causing my chatter to sound tinny, far away. Someone else’s noise. I would look at my husband who looked only ahead, the muscles in his face rippling under flesh gone white. Nothing dangerous. Nothing at all that’s dangerous.

  ‘Hung from a mountain spur two thousand metres above the sea, the village seemed a pile of Iron Age stones relieved here and there by a ruin from the epochs of the Greeks and the Romans. Though people were about the narrow lanes in front of and between the houses, so pure was the silence that I’d thought to have lost the capacity to hear. Later Pierangelo would explain to me that it wasn’t silence I heard but the great, incessant noise of streams and torrents and waterfalls that surrounded the place. Aquapendente, falling waters. It was the raucous crashing of water that I took for silence.

  ‘Pierangelo stopped the auto in a curve of the unpaved road in front of a long, narrow stone building that would have seemed abandoned were it not for wisps of woodsmoke rising from four chimneys and window curtains of bright-coloured cloth swelling in the breeze. Four separate dwellings were suggested by as many wooden doors, one of them opened to reveal a room not two metres high, a bed and a chair filling its whole space. A small flock of scraggy, brownish sheep were being rallied through the lanes by two despotic dogs and I remember waiting until the parade passed before opening the auto door. And then I saw Cosima. She’d come, unnoticed by me, to within a metre or so of us and there she stood, arms crossed over her chest, weeping and smiling. In a shapeless black dress and men’s shoes too large, she was a romantic figure, a kind of timid enchantress from whom someone had stolen her real clothes. I waited for Pierangelo to go to her but he sat quietly in his seat. I stepped out and Cosima stepped closer – another kind of love at first sight. Gathering me to her, saying a few words of welcome, our sympathies were immediate, reciprocal, tender. All that I loved about my husban
d was authenticated in her. His cautionary tales he needn’t have told but rather he should have trusted his mother to be also mine, and to know that both would be my shelter.

  ‘Cosima’s house was the most spacious of the four in the low stone dwelling with its blue shale roof and paint-peeled doors. The walls she whitewashed every Easter and Christmas and the packed-earth floor had so long been swept and trod upon that it had the texture and the sheen of stone. In the sitting room there were white-painted iron sconces on the walls, only occasionally stuck with light bulbs, hand-hewn chairs also painted white, a kind of sofa strewn in a length of salvaged boat sail from the seaside markets and a woodpile laid neat and even. In the kitchen there were four more chairs about a small square wooden table scrubbed nearly to splintering and a pile of plates in a basket by the hearth. Three pots hung from the stones above the hearth shelf, though two were for show since Cosima always reached for the same one no matter what she was about to cook. In the sleeping room there was a small white bed and a trunk larger than it on which stood two tall silver candlesticks, almost garish in that setting, about which she never spoke. Only a sheaf of evergreen or a bottle stuck with wildflowers intruded upon the shades of white in Cosima’s house and the dark figure of her moving about against the pale light there made a quadro vivente, primitive, calming.

  ‘The sail-clothed sofa became Cosima’s bed and there was never a word of bickering among us about her will to relinquish the sleeping room: “The sofa had been Pierangelo’s and now it will be mine. The bed had been mine and now it will be yours.” Cosima had a wondrous way of weeding her discourse, plunging as she did to the marrow of a thing. And her talk reflected her resolve, her ideas slow-ripening as mountain fruit. She seemed free of dilemma. Hers was a road straight, cleared of obstacles, immutable. Divine in its way. Even her wrath she managed with serenity. No bile, no hackles, never demurring from her path, she could unburden rage as genteelly as she could embrace peace. “Lament is futile. Scorn makes bitterness. Vendetta soothes,” she would say.