The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  ‘In any case, the women’s toilettes were enhanced on Thursdays, all of them primping in their way, patting Borotalco from a green and gold tin over freshly bathed bodies, braiding hair or twisting it into intricate knots, festooning themselves with bits of matriarchal jewels and a change of dress. The eldest was forty-eight, the youngest perhaps forty and it was she who, with a sharpened wedge of wood burnt to charcoal, would, always on a Thursday, draw black lines along the slant of her eyelids and I swear those two lines changed how she moved, how she spoke and smiled.

  ‘Oh, yes, does it surprise you how young they all were? Had you been conjuring a bevy of ancients? And have you been wondering about their children?

  ‘Well, those who’d mothered sons had seen them off to their labours by then, down the mountain or to a marriage with a girl from the cities, while their daughters had, likewise, followed their husbands’ paths. Just as I’d done. For some, visits to or from their children were rare enough. Life in the mountains is often lived in epochs – clearly marked – one ending, the next beginning, in a succession natural as the seasons, children yearning sometimes to forget from whence they came, their parents, having loved them well, trusting their babies to the Fates, to the old goddesses. Now, all that about children, that wasn’t what you’d call meandering, was it? Maybe just a little.’

  •

  By now I am captive to Ninuccia. I know nothing of the present. How long have we been sitting here at the long wooden table in the mill? Someone has lit candles in the lanterns, which hang from iron hooks here and there about the place. I know that Ninuccia has placed a string of those half-dried figs near to my hand, that she has pushed toward me the roasted bread that one of the cousins brought to the table. From the tail of my eye, I am aware of men and women who come and go, lugging sacks of olives, carrying away wooden boxes filled with two-litre bottles of new oil. I hear the sound of stones crushing the fruit, the gentle brays of the velvet-eyed she-ass. Ninuccia stops only to eat a fig.

  •

  ‘Cosima. Cosima wore the same dress every Thursday. The colour was of a kind of pewter iridescence that shimmered gold when she moved in it, the heavy silk falling like warmed metal and sheathing the long, skinny frame of her. Her husband had brought it home on the night of her twenty-first birthday. She said she knew it had been thieved, that dress – a spoil from some larger plundering. She said she’d been sure his treachery was greater than that which would yield the humble haul of a pewter-coloured dress.

  ‘On a January dawn less than a month later, while she was still abed with two-year-old Pierangelo asleep beside her, Cosima heard the dull thud her husband’s corpse made as it smite the lane outside the cottage door. She’d always expected it, she knew, she said. She pulled at the bed cover, wadded it up her arms and, barefoot, went to him, covering him, swaddling him, dragging and pushing and pulling him into the house. Not meaning to, she said, she lay down on top of him and rocked and wept until she noticed that Pierangelo, also rocking and weeping, had lain down next to her, next to his father. In that truculent way of hers, Cosima told me this and then never spoke of it again. When once I asked Pierangelo to tell me of his father’s death, he looked at me, held my gaze so fast and hard it frightened me. When he looked away, he said, “I don’t know. No one ever knows.”

  ‘When Cosima wore the dress on Thursday nights, she’d always say how she preferred her black one, that any other one felt like someone else’s. Her heart-shaped lips compressed, nearly stretched into a smile, she’d touch the bodice, pat her hands cautiously here and there about the dress and wonder aloud if it truly had once been someone else’s. And if it had, she wondered, too, who was that someone else? What was she like? And what had her husband known of her?

  ‘One evening while we sat out in the lane, she pulled the dress from her work sack, proceeded to cut off the sleeves, frayed and split as they were. Piecing together the remnants into one long length, she wrapped it about her head, securing the ends under her braids. She looked up at me, the metallic glint of the headdress dancing in her eyes like moonshine and, on the next Thursday when she wore it with the dress, I thought, at last, that Cosima had the right clothes for an enchantress. She never wore any other shoes, though, than the too-large black men’s oxfords or, in winter, Pierangelo’s discarded hunting boots. Had she manoeuvred things in another way, Cosima might have had more – more clothes, more comforts. Once when I asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to have …” it was the only time I saw her veer toward anger. “Non hai capito niente. L’abbondanza é pericolosa. You’ve understood nothing. Abundance is perilous.”

  ‘Were any of the men at home on a Thursday, they would sit and eat and drink with us, having first made their own extraordinary ablutions for the event. White shirts, starched, ironed, buttoned to the neck, jeans or black trousers tucked into boots and, smelling of bergamot and red wine, their skins dark and luminous in the candlelight, they were knights errant, intriguing, erotic, fresh from battle, more lovers than husbands. As I was living it, that divided life seemed a noble one, unmuddied as it was by the niggling hostilities and household tyrannies of an everyday life. When we were together, we seemed new and, I think, exotic to one another. Every time was the first time. When we were apart, well, that’s how it was. Men left to their machinations and their swaggering. To their whoring. Maybe to their whoring. Women – loosed from the quotidian needs and wants of a domesticated man – could tend to one another, to their babies, to themselves and their own modo d’essere, their own way of being. To their own swagger and lust, I don’t know. I shall admit that for all these years since we returned to Orvieto I’ve adored that every-evening moment when I lay down with Pierangelo, limbs tangled, his breath even on my cheek. Still, there was something about that other way of being a couple, that other reality, which was good.

  ‘Thursday Nights notwithstanding, I need not tell you that storms shook the lives of the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. No, I needn’t tell you that. But it was Cosima who kept things apace. Boiling up the mess of life until it came out right, she could lull an anguish, knead a rogue terror into calm, stir beans and potatoes into a feast, she could do that. All this sway of hers, though, was wider than over the seven women. You see, Cosima had a niece.

  •

  ‘Sitting not a hundred metres from Cosima’s place, Sofia lived in the borghetto, a group of cottages clustered on a rise and surrounded by tilled fields and sheepfolds, all of it the property of Sofia’s husband’s family. The daughter and only child of Cosima’s younger brother, Sofia had been orphaned when she was eleven years old. That would have been seventeen years before my time in Acquapendente di Sopra. Sofia was twenty-eight when I met her. Having in some manner displeased the clans, Sofia’s parents – Cosima’s brother and his wife – had also been dispatched in ritual fashion: he heaved into the lane, throat slit, castrated, his severed member placed in his mouth to stifle his final scream; the corpse of his wife strewn, nude and raped, in a ditch in the nearby woods. Cosima took Sofia to live with her and Pierangelo and there Sofia remained until her marriage to Lamberto – eldest son of the “richest” family in the village – when she went to live with him in the borghetto.

  Lamberto, too, did the clans’ bidding. It wasn’t that the malevolence of the clans was less than brazenly clear to him – or to the other men, for that matter – rather it was that each man thought himself to be above or beyond that brazen malevolence. In the way that the rest of us believe dying happens to others, each man in the village took a turn believing that his rapport with the clans would end in riches and glory. Never in a stifled scream. Never him.

  ‘As did the other men, Lamberto lived a once-in-a-while life in the village, spending more of his time soldiering for the clans. This despite his relative familial wealth. This despite his undisguised love for Sofia and the twin daughters who’d been born to them only days after my arrival in Acquapendente di Sopra. Surrounded, coddled – perhaps suffocated – as she and her baby
daughters were by the women in Lamberto’s extended family, Sofia only infrequently visited her aunt Cosima. When she did wander down the rise and through the woods to us, each of her fat cherubs tucked into her own sack, the sacks criss-crossed upon Sofia’s chest, Cosima’s mood was festal. But as much as Cosima would dandle and coo to the baby girls, it was Sofia upon whom her gaze lingered, Cosima never having, I think, outlived the time when Sofia was her own baby girl.

  ‘But even greater than first-blood kinship, there was another connection between Cosima and Sofia. That Cosima’s husband and Sofia’s father – who was, you’ll recall, Cosima’s brother – had been entrenched in the higher echelons of the clans, that their murders both bore the grotesque clan shibboleth, this was the crucial tie that bound Cosima and Sofia. And when one of Lamberto’s sisters came screaming to our door so early one morning that the light was still grey, Cosima, bent to the fire toasting bread while I was seeing to the coffee, took her shawl from a hook near the hearth and walked behind the woman to the borghetto. I walked behind Cosima.

  ‘It was December. Someone, one of the shepherds I think, had carried Lamberto’s body into an outbuilding under the main house, thinking to wait until Sofia had been told before bringing him upstairs. Cosima set to work, sending me to fetch oil, to ask for the finest sheets in the house. Candles, incense. Cosima decided that Sofia would never see her husband until she had prepared him, washed him like a newborn, swaddled him in scented linens so that only his head was free, the cloth cunningly wrapped to cover his garrotted throat, and the other indignities that had been perpetrated upon him. She lit six candles around the wooden table where he lay. Then she called for Sofia.

  ‘Having left Sofia to be alone with Lamberto, Cosima soon joined me outdoors, gestured for me to follow along a beaten path to a shed of sorts, which housed a stove, a stone sink, a work table already laid with baskets of eggs, vegetables, meats, oil, wine, a bin of flour, other things she’d asked to be brought to her. From the rafters of the shed, haunches of prosciutto were aging and, hung by their feet from a wire strung along one wall, freshly killed pheasants and guinea hens twisted in the breezes seeping through the cracks of the rough wooden walls. There was an electric light bulb in a wire frame above the work table. Patting the surface of the table with one hand, Cosima said, “This is where they butcher pigs. By the smell in the air, I’d say they slaughtered one a few days ago. Maybe yesterday.” Walking about the room, inspecting the pans and cooking pots, shuffling through them until she found what she needed, she sniffed the air. “C’è una puzza. There’s a stink.” She walked along the wire where the birds were hung, sniffing and inspecting, finding nothing amiss until, toward the end of the wire, she discovered the cause of the stink.

  ‘“Pig testicles. As I said, they must have slaughtered yesterday. These are fresh off the beast and need to be hung for a day or so to release the poison. Then a saltwater bath, a scrubbing, another day under salt, a bath in white wine and herbs. A long procedure. Polluted things. Worth the work, though. Delicious in a soffritto. Untreated, they are deadlier than an amanita. Once we get onions and garlic moving in a pan, we’ll hardly notice the hideous things,” she said, already ripping skins from onions.

  ‘Leaving the women of Lamberto’s family to their mourning, Cosima would prepare the vigil supper for that evening. For a long time I don’t think she said a word save to direct me to the next job and the next one after that. At one point, though, and without raising her head from her task, she said, “The one who murdered him will come to offer condolences to Sofia this evening. All part of the clans’ love of spectacle. They always send the assassin to visit the widow. A mass card, an envelope filled with lira. He will take Sofia’s hand in both of his. Perhaps he will weep. And then he will sit down to supper.”

  ‘Her face was contorted as she spoke, her breath coming in gasps as though she’d been running, her smooth, dark skin leeched to white. I knew my telling her to sit a while would fall on deaf ears and so I stayed quiet at my work, only looking at her from the tail of my eye. Trying to breathe for her. After a while I remember asking her if we would stay to serve and she said we wouldn’t. We’d tell the maids what was what. She could trust them to the job. And then we’d go home.

  ‘When there seemed nothing left for me to do, I went to the stove where Cosima was still at work. “What is it that you’re preparing?”

  ‘“Un soffritto. Pancetta, lard, rosemary, garlic, onions, peperoncini, red wine, tomatoes. Spooned over bread, a little antipasto.”

  ‘“And in that other pan?” I pointed to a small battered saucepan on the back burner.

  ‘“More of the same. A bit of flesh in this one.”

  ‘“What sort?”

  ‘“Cosa c’era, c’era. What there was, there was.”

  ‘Covering the small battered saucepan with a soup plate, carrying it in both hands, she left the shed. She was gone for a long time; it seemed long. When she returned, her face was almost hers again. She went to the sink, scrubbed her hands, digging under her nails with a brush, letting water run and run over them. Drying them on an apron hung by the door, she reached for her shawl.

  ‘“Andiamo, tesoro. Let’s go, my darling.”

  ‘We walked out into the December afternoon, already dark, down the hill, back through the woods. Cosima held my hand. Having no need for words, we were free to listen to the shuddering of the pines as the wind rose. We both loved that sound, waited for it of an evening. As we walked I thought I was hardly certain of what Cosima did or didn’t do or meant to do back there in the grim little shed. If she wanted me to know, she would tell me. I would never ask her.

  ‘When we were back inside Cosima’s house she crouched to mend the fire, poked at it absently. Suddenly she stood. From the wood pile she lifted two logs, foisted them down from on high, bashing the embers as I saw her do to the head of a viper with a stone one day in the woods. Striking match after match, throwing down faggots of kindling still tied in their ropes, she willed the blaze to leap and rage, and it obeyed. Arms crossed upon her chest, she bent her body over the fire, pressed her forehead against the mantle shelf and wept. When she stood straight again, she held her hands above the flames for a while, taunting the fire to lick them. She dared the flames, dancing her hands lower, lower still, raising them only just in time.

  ‘Without turning to me, she said, “Maligno – fiend. Only vengeance can hinder a fiend. Tomorrow I will ride the bus to Reggio. I will go to offer condolences to his widow. Do you remember, tesoro? The assassin always visits the widow. Will you come with me, tesoro mio?”

  •

  Rising from her chair, her palms still flat on the table, Ninuccia looked at me from the still-faraway place where she’d been. Arranging her mouth in a smile then, she walked around the table to where I sat, cupped my face in her hands, moved it gently, side to side. An apologetic caress. Buttoning her sweater, she said, ‘They were patient with her, the clans, their admiration for her courage keeping them at bay for years. Patient but not forgetful, they took Cosima one evening a few months after we’d come back to live up here. Sparita. Disappeared. A respectful end, to disappear.’

  •

  I don’t remember driving home from the mill that evening. The first thing I do recall is seeing Fernando standing at the entrance to la Porta Romana, the Roman gate, as I drove through it. Ninuccia had called him, told him when I’d left her so he might anticipate my arrival back into town.

  I stop the auto, push the window button. Resting his arms on the edge of the open window and the closed car door, he leans in to kiss me. He kisses me hard.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t … I never thought to …’

  ‘You aren’t going to tell me that you’ve been picking olives by the light of the moon, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m not going to tell you that. I …’

  ‘Miranda came by about seven, just about the time I was beginning to wonder about you. She told me she’d left you with Ninucci
a, said I shouldn’t worry. Miranda-style, she marched right in, looked about for something to cook for my supper. I told her to wash her face and fix her hair, that I’d take her to Eliano for lamb ribs, scottaditta. I gave her your white shawl and we sat for a while downstairs and smoked cigars. And drank Campari. We waited until nine, just in case you might come home in time to go with us. I’d left you a note. When we walked into the darkened salon after eleven and knew you still hadn’t come, I stood out on the balcony, willing you to appear around the corner of the vicolo. I heard Miranda chuckling behind me saying that all was happening just as she knew it would. Whatever that meant. I wouldn’t let her drive home so late. She’s asleep in the downstairs bedroom.’

  All of this he has recounted from his position of leaning into the open window. Now he opens the door, pulls me out and upright. He holds me as though I’d been gone for years. Or is it me holding him that way?

  ‘Calabria. She was telling me about the place where she lived. About the people … Fernando, I want us to go back again to those villages in the mountains, I …’

  ‘She could have driven you down there for all the time she spent telling you about it. Jesus. And don’t give me those eyes. Get inside. You can tell me all about it tomorrow. But whatever it is that you tell me, whatever it was that bewitched you tonight, we are not moving to Calabria.’

  He sits in the driver’s seat, and guns the still-running car before taking it out of neutral. I get in on the passenger side, and tell him, ‘I’m not ready to go home. I have things I want to tell you now, things I want to think about. I wish I were a soprano.’

  ‘Cosa? What?’

  ‘I wish I were a soprano. I wish I could sing plainsong. I wish I knew how to …’

  ‘Is this about Calabria? Do I understand that you wish you were a Calabrian soprano?’ He tries for mirth but exasperation shows through. I can hardly blame him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know you’re tired and …’