The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  ‘I’ve missed you. It’s only that. Every evening counts. I hate to miss one with you.’

  ‘Is that how you felt when I’d stay up half the night talking to B.?’

  ‘How did we get from Calabria and plainsong to B.?’

  ‘Something Miranda said to me not long ago. Did B. and I make you feel excluded? Did you ever think that I was … that I was in love with him?’

  ‘No, to the first. No, to the second. Almost, no. You were enchanted by him, he by you. A state that sometimes can exceed being in love. I never imagined you running off with him or … I loved him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Would it hurt if I told you that he and I were closer than were the two of you?’

  ‘No. I think that’s true, enchantment being a barrier of sorts to love.’

  ‘Brava. Can we stop driving now? I know nothing about plainsong and I find your small raspy voice sensual.’

  We park the car in Piazza Ipollito Scalza, climb the stairs at 34 to find Miranda building a midnight fire.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. Are either of you hungry?’

  ‘No,’ we tell her in quiet unison.

  ‘Now that both of you are here, I can sleep,’ Fernando tells us. ‘Don’t either of you depart for Calabria until I awake.’ Fernando embraces Miranda. Then, the blueberry eyes admonishing, to me he says, ‘A presto, amore mio. Soon, my love.’

  I urge Miranda back to bed. I go into the little red room where I work, search for a copy of a book I wrote in 1999. I find the chapter on Calabria:

  … a region of loose precincts, mostly uninterrupted and surely untamed by time, nearly all of her is of mountains, the villages that bestride them, fortressed one from another, unsavvy to any but its own rites and rituals, its own dialect. Hers is a legacy of brigands. Of brigantesse. After the unification of Italy in 1861 and Rome’s decree against latifondismo – the holding of great parcels of land by a handful of citizens – the south was politically, spiritually abandoned. No enforcement, no intervention came from the new governors and an even more base epoch of serfdom, of insufficiency ensued. Unlike in other southern regions where the poor simply died of hunger or ran away from it, the Calabresi hoisted up their own impassioned service of justice. ’Ndrangheta it’s called. Having perfected if not refined its manners over the years, still ’ndrangheta ministers power over Calabria …

  •

  I have quietly opened the door to our bedroom thinking that, though only ten minutes had passed since he went upstairs, Fernando would be asleep. I’m not quite through the door when, up from the dark, he says, ‘What is it, what is it that draws you so compulsively to …?’

  ‘To whom? To what?’

  ‘To the primitive.’ He whispers this.

  Throwing off my clothes, I settle myself next to him. I whisper, too. ‘Are you saying that Miranda is primitive? She or the others or …’

  ‘No. Yes. In a way she is, they are: their glaring forthrightness, their uncluttered wisdom. Their communalism.’

  ‘Do you think it’s not good that these things draw me to them?’

  ‘No. Not at all. But sometimes I wonder how, when you … when you began to desire to live the lives of your heroines. Now it’s Ninuccia.’

  ‘Not Ninuccia. Her mother-in-law. Cosima was her name.’

  ‘Cosima. Now it’s Cosima. In Sicily it was Tosca …’

  ‘And when I was young I wanted to be Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, neither of whom one could term primitive … Maybe when I lived in California I had a too-choking dose of ladies-who-lunch. I was thought primitive by their measure.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to live in the Aspromonte or keep goats or sing plainsong all the better to emulate these women you admire. You already are who they are. You have their defiance. That may be the pith. Defiance. Wandering about in another mise, with another past, with other gifts than theirs, still, you are of them. Don’t you know that yet? It’s what B. saw, it’s what fascinated him. I can still hear his laugh that morning when he found you on the terrace in jeans and sandals with fourteen-centimetre heels. Already having lit the bread oven, skinned and fried a rabbit, you were slapping three kilos of bread dough on the table with the force of a Fury. You were wearing some sort of unlikely shirt. What was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You remember everything. It was a kind of …’

  ‘A brown taffeta bustier. And B. had done most of the skinning before he left the beast – headless, slit and deprived of its pluck – the day before. And I wore those sandals maybe twice in all the time we lived in San Casciano. You hate it when I wear workboots, think it odd when I wear shoes with high heels, but when I wear boots you ask whatever happened to all those beautiful shoes …’

  ‘You see? Defiance. For you there are only two kinds of footwear.’

  ‘Was it my primitiveness that drew you to me?’

  ‘I didn’t know it then, but, yes. I think it was. Most notably, the defiance part.’

  •

  ‘Pronto.’ I fumble for the bedside telephone and my just-awakened voice is tentative, frightened. I think it’s the middle of the night.

  ‘Chou, buongiorno. Don’t tell me you’re still abed?’

  ‘Ninuccia. Buongiorno. I … we …’

  ‘Will you meet me at the mill in an hour? I think we should give that pasta a trial before tomorrow night. The wine and oil are there and I’ll bring pasta. Just the two of us, though I’ll tell Miranda and …’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, Miranda … Why don’t you leave that to me … you see, she’s here. I mean I think she’s here …’

  I call down the stairs to Miranda but there is no answer. I bathe, dress, leave Fernando to his sleeping. A dark blue paper-wrapped box tied in silver string waits on the kitchen table. Miranda has left croissants from Scarponi, prepared the Bialetti for the flame. A più tardi, later, she’s scrawled with a fountain pen on a piece of paper towel, the ink having seeped through to the tablecloth. Having no clock in the house nor watches for our wrists, we tell time mostly by the bells and those of the Duomo are now announcing a quarter to eleven. I call Miranda and tell her what Ninuccia has asked.

  ‘I’ll come back into town so you can leave the car for Fernando. Twenty minutes. Be downstairs.’

  As I do so often, I pray to the gods, should I someday reach Miranda’s age, that I shall be like her.

  Leaving things as Miranda has arranged them, I write a note to Fernando inviting him to join Ninuccia and Miranda and I at the mill at about one. I take a half-kilo pat of local butter and a stem of ginger from the fridge, and wrap them in a kitchen towel. From the spices in the armoire, I take a piece of cinnamon bark and a glass tube of Madagascar cloves, tuck everything into an old Dean & DeLuca canvas sack. I have a quick espresso at Bar Duomo, run the few metres to i Swizzeri to buy chocolate: 200 grams of Lindt, 99 per cent cacao, into the sack. Time for another espresso before the goddess of Buonrespiro sputters to a stop in front of San Giuseppi.

  ‘This is a good sign, I hope you realise that,’ she says.

  Luminous this morning, her braids just done and pinned into an extra-high crown, Miranda wears a navy faille dress, which she usually saves for evening, and, I think, a delicate smudge of rouge across her cheekbones.

  ‘This is not a lack of trust on Ninuccia’s part. It’s curiousity. It’s …’

  The bells of San Bartolomeo begin ringing high noon as we enter Castelpietro – the town entire sitting on a single curve of the road – and, by the time we’re already through the place, the bells have yet to get to nine. A few minutes later when we walk into the mill, Paolina and Gilda, Settimio (the mill caretaker), four men whom I’ve never seen before, Ninuccia and at least five of her cousins are all busy at one thing or another: laying a cloth on the long wooden table, taking this morning’s loaves from their brown paper sacks, setting down platters of Settimio’s house-made salame, filling wine jugs, carrying a pasta-caul
dron full of water, placing it on the flame, dragging in more olives, carrying out more boxes of two-litre and five-litre bottles of new oil. Two of the cousins are at the work of brushing down the she-ass and feeding her.

  Greetings and small talk are cut short when Ninuccia says, ‘Okay, Chou, take over.’

  I add my shawl and hat to the others already hanging by the door, wash my hands at the sink which must once have been a baptismal font. The challenge begins.

  ‘Let’s gather together everything I’ll need,’ I say.

  Ninuccia moves a bowl of dried pasta closer to the stove.

  Tre kili di penne rigate,’ she tells me, arms crossed upon her chest.

  Nearly seven pounds of penne. Seven pounds. It’s only then that I understand that Ninuccia’s aformentioned intimate lunch among three or four of us has grown into a festa for maybe twenty. Hence the enormous cauldron on the flame. ‘I’ll need sea salt, four litres of red, a pepper grinder, a mortar and pestle. I’ve brought the … the other things I’ll need.’ I’m not yet ready to speak of cloves and ginger and chocolate. I am less ready to speak of butter here in the birthing room of Umbria’s finest oil.

  ‘I’m right behind you, Chou. Give me a job.’ This is Gilda.

  Having found the mortar and pestle with Settimio’s help, Paolina brings it to me.

  ‘Allora, Paolina, fifteen cloves pounded with this piece of cinnamon bark,’ I tell her, taking the spices from my sack. Paolina sets to work and several of the others, already mystified, gather closer in.

  ‘Gilda, please peel this ginger, then chop and smash it to a paste.’

  ‘Questo é zenzero?’

  ‘That’s real ginger. What you call ginger in dialect is actually peperoncino.’

  ‘Non ho capito.’

  I repeat, ‘Per voi, zenzero vuol dire peperoncino. For you, zenzero means peperoncino. Ginger, it’s called in English.’ Miranda rescues. ‘Geen-jer. A pretty word. Geen-jer,’ she repeats and some of the others take up the chant. One of the cousins tells the she-ass about geen-jer.

  ‘L’acqua bolle,’ shouts Ninuccia and, after heaving in four good fistsful of coarse sea salt, I throw in the pasta, stir it with a metre-long olivewood spoon.

  Gilda brings a ricketty metal stool over to the stove and tells me ‘You’re too small to work with that monster of a pot.’

  ‘Three minutes. Only three minutes, Ninuccia, and then drain it,’ I tell her.

  ‘I? You drain it.’ She knows I won’t be able to lift that cauldron by myself but Paolina is right there.

  ‘I’ll watch the time, and in exactly two and a half minutes, Gilda and I will drain it.’

  I pour three litres of red into a pot and heat it over a low flame. In a smaller pot, I heat another litre of red and, girding myself for scorn, add half the butter I’ve brought, about 250 grams. No one comments. No one, at least not close enough so that I hear. I ask Miranda to grind pepper with a heavy hand into the butter-wine mixture, to keep the flame only high enough to melt the butter.

  ‘I must have a pan large enough in which to toss all the pasta,’ I say perhaps a bit too loudly.

  I’m assured there isn’t such a thing there and so I’ll use the cauldron again, once the pasta is drained. Now everyone but the she-ass has gathered in. The unabashed scrutiny both rattles and exhilarates me.

  Without my asking them to, Paolina and Gilda drain the pasta at the three-minute mark, leaving it slightly wet, just as it should be. I take up the empty cauldron, add the litre of oil, the other half of the butter and set it on a medium flame.

  ‘I’ll need the ginger now … and the pounded cinnamon and cloves.’

  ‘Geen-jer pronto.’ Gilda brings the ginger on the blade of her knife and Paolina hands me the mortar. I scrape in the ginger and dump the spices into the hot fats, let the mass warm and send up opulent, spicy steam. People begin to sniff, to move closer yet to the stove. Into the cauldron then with the barely cooked pasta. With the olivewood spoon, I begin rolling the pasta about in the perfumed fats. In my mind, I thank Gilda for thinking of the stool. My arm aches as I try to get to the bottom of the seven pounds of pasta. Dig, turn, dig, turn. I switch hands but my right one is too weak and so take the spoon back into my left, supporting it at the elbow with my right. I raise the flame then, allow the pasta to take on some colour, some crust. I move it all again, leave it to colour a bit more. Now, two large ladlesful at a time, I begin dosing the pasta with the three litres of warmed wine. I can tell even now that I’ll need at least another litre. Paolina is close enough for me to ask her to pour more wine into the pot so it will warm with what’s already there. As the pasta drinks in the wine, I add more. Ninuccia has handed out tumblers and Miranda has gone around with the wine pitchers. The pasta drinks, the crowd drinks and takes turns tearing at the loaves on the table. They plunder Settimio’s salame. Fernando arrives and gets to the work of heating the dishes by the fire before bringing them, stacked and warmed, to the table near the stove.

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ he says, massaging my shoulders. ‘Good thing about your shoes,’ he says close to my ear.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘The heels. Can’t be much over ten centimetres. Perfect for a stint on a stool at the stove in an olive mill.’

  Turning to him, I try for a glare but begin to laugh, and take time to kiss the tips of my fingers, flinging them toward Paolina and Gilda who stand guard nearby. I turn back to the dosing of the pasta until it reaches the desired still-toothy texture, add the litre of wine, which I’d warmed with butter and pepper. I call for another large wooden spoon and with both in my hands I begin to toss and toss, glossing every piece of pasta, which, by now, has taken on the colour of old Bordeaux – amaranthine with a golden rim. I know why Paolina and Gilda don’t offer to spell me in this last step of the process.

  ‘A tavola, a tavola. To the table, to the table,’ Miranda claps her hands and it’s Ninuccia and Gilda who hold out the deep warmed plates into which I ladle the pasta – twenty-two plates to be precise. It’s Paolina who carries the plates to the table, four at a time, two plates resting on each of her inner arms. As she takes the last four plates, I take a small, sharp knife from a drawer, unwrap my 99 per cent chocolate and, one by one, I stop by each place, shaving the chocolate over the hot, hot pasta so that it melts on contact. I think most of the people don’t know it’s chocolate but perhaps some strange truffle or a sort of exotic cheese. Miranda sees what I’m doing, asks Settimio for his clasp-knife and, cracking off a large piece of the chocolate in my hand for herself, begins on the other side of the table. Finally Miranda and I sit in front of our own plates, she shaving chocolate over mine, I over hers. No one speaks. The soft noises of slurping, chomping, of grinding mandibles and clacking dentures fill the room. Then a voice.

  ‘E favolosa, questa pasta.’ I don’t know the name of this man who names the pasta fabulous, still I want to kiss him. Instead, Miranda gets up, does just that. They are asking for more but there is none. I drink deeply of my wine, watch Ninuccia watching me.

  Sated, everyone seems content to sit a while. Very softly then, as though only to herself, Ninuccia begins to sing. Not sing, really, but chant in what must be the minor-key wail of the women in the mountains. Never before have I heard these sounds from an Umbrian yet others join her, only two, maybe three. I try to echo the sounds Ninuccia makes. I realise this is what the others are also doing. Now there are more of us. Ninuccia always leading, her eyes closed, her voice grows stronger and so do ours. The men begin to sing. Fernando is singing and I’m singing and weeping and Miranda is weeping. I think to Cosima in her Thursday Night dress: shimmering like gold when she moved in it … to her tribe chanting and keening, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

  Ninuccia’s voice goes silent and the others, perhaps a note or two later, quieten, too. I feel Ninuccia looking at me again and raise my head to see it’s so. What is it in those gre
at grey eyes? She knows I’ve been thinking of Cosima. Is there also some small apology in that gaze? For having set me up for this impromptu lunch for two to which she’d invited twenty? A test?

  Still no one has moved from the table. Communion has been taken but the mass has not ended. Why have they sung someone else’s song, these Umbrians who are mostly very old? As though water and mountains and time have never separated one tribe from another.

  It’s Settimio who speaks first. ‘That … that song with no words, it was the one my mother sang to us. Four of us. One bed, my mother rocking in her chair, I swear it was that song she sang.’

  A murmur of compliance. An aunt, a mother, another mother, also they sang that song. It can’t be so, not that very song, and yet Ninuccia’s voice has comforted them as did long-ago voices raised in the melancholoy of a lullabye, a night song, a sonata in B flat minor. In the mountains, in Cosima’s mountains, the chanting was another kind of comfort, the sound of the tribe’s own angelus signalling rebellion. A prelude to vendetta.

  ‘Shall we make a pact, here and now? Every year when the wine and the oil are new, we’ll meet at this same table for this same meal?’ This is Ninuccia.

  Miranda looks at me and I know she is telling me, Do you understand? This is how it happens … The way rituals are born. As Fernando said I was, Miranda is also telling me, you are of us.

  One of Ninuccia’s cousins, a woman with the same Titian hair as hers, asks the man who sits across from her, ‘Enrico, didn’t you like the pasta? Why aren’t you happy?’

  ‘Certo, certo, certainly I liked it. And of course I’m happy.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you crying?’

  PART III

  PAOLINA

  IT IS LATE IN OCTOBER OF 2006, TWO YEARS AFTER Miranda’s fraudulently professed withdrawal from Thursday Night cooking. Not only has Miranda been constantly at the Thursday burners, but all four of we others have been there with her. Ten-handed Ravel we’ve been playing. We spar and tiff, we quarrel and laugh and sometimes we sing.