Advice for Italian Boys (15 page)

O
n the afternoon of the shower, a bright day, a day that started and remained cold enough that the air stung the nose and smelled of iron and almonds, and yesterday’s spring slush refroze on the streets into slippery ridges, Nicolo drove his mother and nonna slowly through the streets, with their scant, dawdling Sunday traffic, and pulled up at the front of Palazzo Enrico on Bernardi Street just south of dingy, shuttered St. Clair. They were late; Nonna hadn’t been able to find one of her single pair of good shoes. Massimo, who was not looking for it, was the one who found it, in the basement cantina on the shallow window ledge with a cartoonishly flattened spider adhered to its sole.

Paola helped her mother-in-law out of the back seat of the car. She had learned over many years that irritation only fed on itself and that an unnecessarily solicitous act was often helpful to put to rest the hot white sparks that sometimes swarmed inside her head like angry hornets. She held open one of the hall’s heavy, gilded doors to let Nonna enter, and Nonna nodded left and right as she passed over the threshold like a duchess on a carpet acknowledging her subjects.

Nicolo heard a burst of distinctively feminine noise released into the street when the doors were pulled apart. Talk like a stream, familiar shouting, the calling out of names, comforting, abundant, anchoring, the sound of happy women celebrating a milestone of one of their own. The noise was a thicket, a jungle, a rain forest, made up of dozens of voices, layered, intermingled, excited, high pitched as flutes, with a warm echoing trill like evening birdsong. Was that where the slang term “bird” for young women had come from? Nicolo wondered. Or did it come from the way girls and women seemed so often to dart more lightly than men did from one thing to another?

The doors swung shut, leaving Nicolo in what sounded at first, by contrast, like solitude and silence. After another moment, his ears adjusted to the noise of car engines, brakes whistling, tires spinning against spring slush, the whine of a faraway machine of some kind, and a horn’s repeated blasts, territorial and aggressive. Mechanical sounds, in an entirely different impersonal, industrial register from the clamorous celebrations within. Nicolo turned the car right and right again, into the lane behind the building. He parked
and found another wide set of doors, poor twins of the ones in the front, and entered.

The corridor was lit only by the red-pink glow of the exit sign above the doors. Nicolo didn’t need to wait for his eyes to adjust or to feel along the wall for a light switch. He was guided toward the kitchen by his ears. The clang of pans. The clatter of dishes and cutlery and glasses. Heavy objects being dropped or stirred in tubs or pots or bins. Metal wheels spinning over ringing tiles. A low, churning sound accompanied by bursts of water and steam: the motor of an industrial dishwasher. A larger, broader rumble not unlike gears tumbling together—men’s voices. Bursts of laughter, sharp and happy, reminded Nicolo of dogs let loose and barking together. Inviting stripes of light could be seen around the edges of another set of doors, without knob or handle, dented where they had been pushed with carts.

And then he was in the kitchen, and this was what it must be like to be born: an unknowing plummet into moist air and overbright light and a close, dense cacophony of sounds. Two cooks, noble and tall as cardinals, in billowing white hats, stood before a massive stove, manhandling pot after pot in ranks on the stovetop—steaming, boiling, hissing, lids rattling, the cooks’ spoons clashing and clanging against them like the clappers of church bells. Two other cooks, with peaked white folded caps like paper boats, were pulling pans from an oven in which an ox might have been roasted with room at the side for pumpkins. Platters on every surface were piled with orgies of seafood, carmine tomatoes cut in rounds and spread in fans, billows of white bocconcini, melon flesh—green, white, peach—sweating
in cool crescents, ruby meats marbled with glistening fat sliced thin as parchment, black olives dusted with salt and as deeply wrinkled as prunes, a coronary of artichoke hearts marinated in oil and vinegar, purple eggplant and lime-green asparagus, bowls filled with mounds of pale lettuce, deep green, vibrant and spiky arugula, parsley, peeled curls of carrot and thin strands of translucent onion. Gallon jugs of green-gold oil and of wine vinegar were lined up in rows. The boat-hatted cooks leaned forward, reaching massive hands into shiny rectangular vats overflowing with grated cheese, sliced peppers, chopped onion and garlic, basil, oregano, peperoncini. In musical precision, they swept handfuls of colour—white, green, yellow and red—over platters, bowls and plates. A convoy of two-tiered metal carts moved in both directions, pushed by women, half a dozen or more, strong-armed, red-faced, with their hair in nets, wearing wide white aprons and once-white shoes with silent beige crepe soles. The outward-bound carts were pushed into a dark passage that must have led to the front of the hall. On these rattled food-laden white plates and the platters, with their border pattern of entwined gardenias. The carts rattling back to the kitchen were ferrying plates that had been wrecked, ransacked, plates disordered as a battlefield: sodden crumbs, gnawed bones, brown olive pits, torn edges of lettuce, single slippery strands of pasta, tomato sauce smeared and spattered as if a murder had been committed, the fronded heads and burst tails of giant shrimp, bread crusts on which butter shone in a scalloped pattern where teeth had torn, shreds of onion, crumpled napkins slashed with lipstick and stained with wine.

Several tables had been set end to end down the middle of the kitchen, and a miscellany of chairs and stools placed around it, all of them occupied by men of various ages. Mario was there, at the near end of the table, with Paul on one side and Frank on the other. Mario’s father Ugo was seated at the far end, with Mario’s uncle Lou, and Angie’s father Sal and her brother Joe; and those two skinny teenaged boys over close to the stove were probably Angie’s cousins from Vancouver, Nick and Guido—they had the same high brow and square, dark-shadowed chin as Sal and Joe. There were a number of other men Nicolo didn’t know and whose shouted names he didn’t catch.

Nicolo found a stool under a counter and a place was made for him in Mario’s zone of the table, two seats away from Frank. There was a tribal cry of welcome, greetings, introductions, and then enormous platters of meat, fish, chicken, pasta and salad were raised high in the air by sets of arms with rolledback sleeves, and passed down the table toward him. A squat glass was placed in front of him and amber wine, someone’s uncle’s homemade, splashed into it. A complicated joke was being told by someone at the other end of the table in a mix of Italian and dialect, about a novice nun and an old priest and a donkey and a hen, and laughter swelled in anticipation of the punchline. The story was met with a roar of approval and then alternative versions and endings were loudly put forward. No, not a hen but a cock! Not a novice nun, but an ancient crone. She has to be old for the joke to work! Paul yelled something to the table as a whole. A one-up on the punchline, it seemed, because laughter and competitive shouting erupted again all around the table.

“
Non è possibile! Non è possibile,
” Frank declared, and the table fell into factions dedicated to one aspect or another of the debate.

Nicolo tried to listen but it was impossible to fix on any single conversation and so what he took in was a medley, while he pushed back his own sleeves and mostly concentrated on eating. He suddenly felt empty, starving. Everything tasted good and there was no end of it. The platters that were passed around the table from man to man to man left his two hands more or less depleted, but came back from one side or the other filled up again. This was living, he thought, this was life perfected. Comrades, food, warmth, talk, laughter. Who would willingly choose anything different?

Because he was at the business end of the kitchen, the cooks and waitresses occasionally brushed against his back as they worked. When a dishwasher was pulled open behind him, Nicolo turned and blinked into a thick bank of steam through which cooks and servers came and went. A section of the cloud thickened, billowing closer to him, taking on substance, coalescing as it neared on its rattling cart into a cake as tall as a schoolgirl, swaying slightly from its large cake hips to its small garlanded cupcake head, enticingly iced in white, with pink and yellow swags, buttons and rosettes. The cart moved seemingly on its own, as if it were being propelled on tracks.

Nicolo rose to his feet on an impulse that he could not define, and followed the cake and cart through the dense dishwasher cloud, out of the kitchen and into the dim corridor. The cart darted ahead, driven forward by a bent figure in white, and once again Nicolo heard the rich abundance
of sounds coming from the hall at the front of the building, louder, more raucous, and higher pitched than the voices and industrial noises of the kitchen. One turn, and then another, a shallow rubbery ramp up, and then through swinging doors (metal on his side, red satiny material on the other) into the back of the main banquet hall. The cake surged ahead into the brilliant lights and noise, and Nicolo hung back, hidden from view between a stack of chairs and a piano, behind the deep folds of thick curtains that hung all the way from the ceiling to the floor and smelled of dust and blocked out the light. The dining room was vast; it could have held a hundred tables or more, although only a portion of the far end of the room was now in use, where a dozen or more round tables of twelve women each had been set up near a long table occupied by Angie, her sisters, her mother, and Nicolo’s mother and sister.

“You are just in time. I love this part.”

A girl’s hushed voice below his ear, a hand pressed against his arm just above the wrist, almost as if his arrival had been expected. There was a scent around her that Nicolo could not identify. Vanilla, a flower, orange peel, sweat. Nicolo was not surprised—or rather, all of this was surprising.

A group of women had gathered around Angie, who was being led now to a chair draped in white cloth and garnished with paper lace and curling ribbons and streamers. She wore pale trousers and a yellow sweater and high-heeled shoes. Her hair was piled on top of her head and her cheeks were flushed. Someone dimmed the room lights except for a single bright spotlight that shone over Angie and her throne. A woman wearing a white pantsuit pressed a plastic tiara
into Angie’s tall, stacked hair, and a woman in a long dress patterned with roses chose a parcel from a skirted table at the side of the room that was piled high with presents and handed it to her. Angie accepted the parcel and balanced it on her lap. Then she carefully removed several clusters of pale purple ribbons that had been cut and curled and gathered together like chrysanthemums, and drew apart the layers of pink wrapping paper.

The gift, unveiled, was announced by the woman in the dress with roses in a trilling, elated voice: “An electric pasta-maker!” The woman in the pantsuit took the pasta-maker and held it high, and then carried it around the room to each table so that the guests could admire it. Many of them reached out and touched it or held it as it was borne aloft. Angie’s mother, who was seated beside Angie, took and neatly folded the discarded wrapping paper. Angie’s sister stood just behind the chair, using a stapler to attach the ribbons and bows from the present to a very large paper plate. The next gift to be unwrapped, announced and exhibited was a cappuccino machine, and after that a set of white sheets—”three hundred thread-count!”

“The presentation of the consumer goods,” said the girl at Nicolo’s elbow. Her voice was low, gravelly, amused. “And later they’ll make her wear the hat that they’re making out of that paper plate. Could any better reason exist to remain single forever?”

Nicolo looked down at the hand on his arm. A small hand, no bigger than a child’s, short uneven nails, perhaps bitten. The top of a head of curling hair, the blunt end of a nose, the curve of a cheek, fine scant lashes, a white shirt with a neckline
open low to show clavicles that framed triangle cavities deep enough to rest a pair of eggs in, the faint scent that now reminded him of something freshly made in a bakery—lemons, cinnamon, cloves. A scrap of a girl. Nicolo could imagine himself lifting her in the air with one hand, in the way the strongman in a circus in his striped muscle-shirt might raise a spangled acrobat, her stomach balanced in his palm, her head, arms and legs extended and flashing like the rays of a star. The absurdity of the thought made him smile.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s like you can’t be properly married unless you’ve got half a department store to play house with,” the girl said.

“I don’t think it’s so bad. It’s meant to help them get started, to give them some of the things they might need,” Nicolo said, remembering Mima’s wedding shower gifts, the pots and dishes and towels and cookbooks.

“So you think a bride’s chances for a happy marriage are improved if she is launched into matrimony in possession of an electric deep-fryer, a pair of silver ice buckets, china for twenty people and a matched set of thousand thread-count sheets?”

“Some gifts are more practical than that. My brother’s wife got—”

“Someone she loved?”

“Well, it was a bit more complicated than that.”

“In that case, maybe they needed the consumer goods so that they would have something in common.”

“They had a baby in common pretty quickly.”

“Oh. I see.”

“It all worked out.”

“They found they were able to bond after all over the fiftypiece espresso set?”

“I don’t think any of that really mattered to them.”

“But they didn’t skip it, right? They had a shower and hauled in the loot like pirates?”

“Yes, and wedding presents and a few baby showers too.”

“So how many years have they been married? Have they ever even
used
the good china?”

“Six or seven years. I’m sure they’ll get around to it. They’ve been pretty busy.” Nicolo was annoyed at the girl for understanding none of this, and at himself for feeling so unable to explain. He dipped his head to try to get a better look at her, but she remained mostly in shadows. It was hard to see more than the gleam and shadow of her collarbone and the shimmer of her white blouse, which seemed almost to float on its own in the darkness. “Who are you anyway? A friend of Angie’s?”