Amore and Amaretti (19 page)

While we are preparing our final dinner in the Saturday-morning class, the owner of the villa unexpectedly visits us. He is a lawyer based in Rome who spends occasional weekends at the villa; we are delighted, confused and excited to meet him and thrown into complete disarray when he suggests that we bring all our prepared dishes up to the main house that evening to join him and his wife and several other guests for dinner. One of the older women in our group wonders, when he departs, if there is time for a quick facelift.

That evening the lawyer seats me beside him at the top of the long table and we dine under chandeliers in a room straight from the Middle Ages, complete with busts of emperors above marble fireplaces and vast canvases of battles on the faded walls. I feel exhaustion and privilege in equally deep measures.

Coming back for another season at La Cantinetta was always going to depend on Gianfranco; each time I write letters home, I have a different plan. Towards the very end, some small falling-out triggers the ultimate decision, as if I am just looking for a reason not to come back and face the loneliness and the long, tough hours all over again. I think that I may return at some time, when I have recovered. But my main desire now is to carry back with me all the events, the recipes, the people and the emotions, and calmly spread them out on the floor to begin to make sense of them all. When Valerie, Douglas and I have driven our little group back to Florence airport at the end of the week, we then head on to Perugia so that I can spend my last days in the always-soothing company of Raimondo and Annamaria. This has become the way that I leave Italy.

Baccalà, fegato e ova – più si coce e più s'assoda

Salt cod, liver and eggs – the more you cook them the tougher they become

Back in Sydney, I move straight into a convenient spare bedroom in William's Woollahra flat. But sharing my friend William's small stylish flat is never going to work in the long term. Best friends at first, we become the worst enemies as I struggle naively to make a living by teaching cooking classes at creative venues and William gives up trying not to be gay. We are both deeply unhappy; after one screaming match, we stop talking to each other and I move out.

I teach Italian cooking classes in art galleries, pub kitchens and private homes. In between, there are private catering and short-lived jobs in dubious cafés. Most of all I harbour a sick sense that nothing is working out. I imagined that by my early forties I would be neatly married with three children – and now I don't even have a boyfriend. Acutely lonely, I make the social rounds of dinner parties, restaurants and meeting people for drinks, most of it adding up to emptiness and pointlessness. I launch into an unwise affair with an old friend who has been with the same partner for years; it is as unsatisfactory as all such flings are, because, of course, he doesn't leave her for me. On the one hand, there are more acquaintances with whom to socialise expensively and excessively than I want, and on the other an obsession with the gym and self-control.

The sun in my eyes one Friday evening prevents me from seeing the semi-trailer parked by the side of a busy road and I slide smoothly into it; had there been a passenger beside me he would have perished. Living inner city, I decide thereafter to rely on public transport. A job at a deli crops up, and I accept it with relief – running my own business had been a mistake – only to spend the ensuing months, however, becoming steadily more miserable as the boss chips away at my naturally precarious self-esteem until there is little left. It is almost a relief to be fired, although it means the ignominy of unemployment benefits (at my age – with my talents, skills and education!) and the round of job-hunting. And wondering why I am amounting to nothing, in spite of Italy.

Book Three

1996

Spedaluzzo, near Florence

Chi trova un amico, trova un tesoro

He who finds a friend finds a treasure

Donatella is the one blamed with sending Ignazio, in his new, sleek, silver car, into the wall. I am to hear the Donatella story later on – thanks largely to Alvaro's great affection for gossip. At a great speed, and with blithe disregard for both seatbelts and prior intake of alcohol, he has managed to smash not only the car but also a large proportion of the bones from his right shoulder down to his wrist.

Gianfranco assures me over the phone, eighteen months after we last spoke, that the car's condition is terminal, whereas –
‘Grazie a Dio!'
– Ignazio's is not. He is, however, a one-armed member of the operation for now, requiring intensive physiotherapy and not being of much use to La Cantinetta, which is why I am being asked to step into the breach, as it were. And is also why I am, yet again, boarding the train from Rome to Florence dazed with jet lag after the endless flight.

An incident with knives at Fiumicino airport indirectly led to the loss of the bulky fur-lined jacket I arrived in and gratefully shed in the heat of a late European summer. My favourite chef's knife and paring knife were forced by law to travel separately from the rest of my luggage, sealed firmly inside a plastic bag and accompanied by several stern documents that I had laboriously filled out at Sydney airport. There is a collection area at Fiumicino where dubious objects like knives are to be claimed, but after several visits, enquiring of several officials, my knives never materialise. I am back in my beloved Italy, though, and while it is disappointing, the loss of the knives seems entirely unsurprising. (Months later I ask Gianfranco to help me to construct a careful letter to the airport describing my experience. The fact that the letter is never answered also comes as no surprise.) I do feel sad about my jacket, which in my dazed state I presumably left on the train. However, I comfort myself with the prospect of being obliged, towards the end of my stay here, to buy a new one.

Meanwhile, the train is sliding me through hot lime and gold August countryside, the gentle curves of the hills, a sudden river crossing, car factories, a silver gas tanker moving through an avenue of green. We rush through the brief coolness of tunnels; some are so long you forget it is daytime, and then you burst into green and sunshine, your ears popping. Half-broken houses of stone, ruins taken over by ivy perched on hilltops, white roads twisting out of sight, calves lying hotly in fields beside their gently grazing mothers. Gallese, Settebagni, Orte – the towns swish past. Bassano, Attigliano…

I am only to be in Tuscany for a few months, just to help out over the end of a very busy summer; that factor, coupled with the sheer familiarity of my expectations, enables me to barely consider the negative aspects of two years ago. All it takes, then, is the sight of Gianfranco pouchy-eyed and rumpled hair waiting for me at Florence railway station, his face splitting into joy when he sees me, to make it all feel like coming home.

Yet, so many things are different. There is Tonino, for a start, a sturdy toddler with Cinzia's dark beauty and – in evidence already – Gianfranco's personality. There is also Vito, a sixty-something dishwasher whose cheery grandfatherly features both reassure me and remind me (obscurely) of someone from my past. He is leaning in front of the television positioned on the kitchen counter when we arrive, watching the Palio, the annual Siena horse race, with rapt concentration. The kitchen itself is different: now the stoves form an island in the centre of the room so that there are two distinct working areas.

I fling myself into Alvaro's arms, delighted that the old kitchen hand is still there. Gianfranco told me on the journey home that when I left, two years earlier, he trained Alvaro to take my place. Now that I am back, Alvaro will take Gianfranco's position as head chef and I am able to resume my usual role as assistant. Ignazio, thinner and paler, has one arm in an elaborate sling. Ever since the accident, he has been living back at his parents' apartment in Scandicci, enabling me to occupy his large bedroom for the duration of my stay. This bedroom has nearly the same outlook as my previous one had, the green-shuttered windows opening out onto the main road of Via Chiantigiana, the white road disappearing behind ornate wrought-iron railings opposite. The first thing I do is to fling open the windows, then the shutters, and drink in the view and the sounds and the smells, and let the landscape part gently to readmit me.

Ne ammazza più la gola che la spada

Gluttony kills more than the sword does

It is the weekend, and I am already being persuaded to accompany Gianfranco, Cinzia and Tonino to the Isle of Giglio the following Tuesday. Barely unpacked, I prepare a small overnight bag of mainly swimming attire; we will only be gone for two nights. Setting off after service on the Monday night brings back, with a rush of affection, all those times years ago when Gianfranco and I would drive to his village. The drive itself feels similar, late at night and alcohol-fuelled, with the car's headlights carving tunnels out of the blackness and the glowing tips of Gianfranco's cigarette – the only major difference being my position in the back seat and Cinzia's tanned arms enfolding a sleeping child in the front. We arrive at the port at four o'clock in the morning and have several hours to sleep uncomfortably before the ferry departs. I sleep fitfully, briefly, and quietly let myself out of the car just as the sun begins to rise to wander through foreign deserted streets in pursuit of a toilet, in a daze composed of lingering jet lag, tiredness and a seedy hangover.

By the time the ferry arrives, the sun is already scorching rooftops and searing my pallid winter skin. Gianfranco brings coffee and pastries to wake us up properly before driving the car on board. I feel as if I could sleep for a week, but remind myself stoically that the little island escapade will be a perfect pause before launching into three months of hot stoves and long, exhausting hours. Silvio and Carla, Cinzia's parents – at whose holiday house we are staying – are there to meet us and escort us home. They have been on the island all summer and their limbs are the colour of chocolate.

That first day is a series of pleasures. Silvio and Carla take us out on a boat, where we drift for several hours in turquoise water, periodically splashing overboard to seek relief from a blazing sun. Carla fascinates me; covertly I observe the mesmerising way she rubs oil on a perfectly toned body barely reined in by the briefest bikini, her long scarlet fingernails turning pages of a magazine. She frequently applies lipstick with the aid of a tiny mirror. I know from Cinzia that Carla and Silvio met at ballroom dancing classes twenty-odd years ago, and that she has continued the twice-weekly lessons ever since. I am impressed by her glamour, but uneasy about such an excess of vanity. Her neck stretches swan-like out of the water as she doggy-paddles in neat circles around the boat, her fashionable hairdo intact, while the rest of us bomb noisily and swim heartily. Much later, under a canopy of bougainvillaea, we sit down to endless courses of food in the company of Cinzia's brothers and various family friends, who have brought contributions of wine and pastries, cheeses and fruit. We eat and drink long into the night.

Something I eat at the fabulous feast that night manages to ruin the following half-day we have on this island before heading back. The abdominal cramps can only be dealt with by sitting in shallow water at the beach and making regular dashes to the public toilets. All around me holidaymakers robustly hurl themselves into the day. I listen to most of the life story of one of the women who dined with us the previous evening, and then it is time for us to leave, to catch the ferry to the mainland and head back to La Cantinetta. I am apprehensive about my delicacy on the ferry, but in fact halfway through the journey I become extremely hungry. By the time we are back on land, I am almost euphoric with health.

I am astonished at Alvaro's transformation of my old room. His double bed occupies three-quarters of the space, and the rest is a clutter of table and chairs, stereo system complete with enormous loudspeakers, television set, pile upon pile of magazines, a wobbly bookshelf stuffed with more eclectic reading matter, huge ugly ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, a gnawed teddy bear in a soccer jersey, flasks of wine. Clothes, both clean and dirty, drape over every available surface. It exudes cosiness and indolence, unlike the austere bedroom I have moved into, where quivering cobwebs drape from the high ceiling. Every time Gianfranco and Cinzia drive away late at night, it feels as if we are children left alone by unsuspecting parents, to run riot if we choose.

Gianfranco's menu has additions to, and subtractions from, the one two years ago, though some dishes, clearly those that have become his signature ones, are still there. Although I have arrived in the second half of summer, there is still the plethora of gorgeous summer produce dictating the food we make. Furthermore, Gianfranco's funny little garden out the back has now developed into a glorious source of herbs, fruits and vegetables, which we plunder with regularity. There are too many figs, and many lie scattered and skin-split at the base of their trees. They are perfect mashed onto roasted bread.