Amore and Amaretti (29 page)

That first week is wet, cold and windy; outside each front door on every marbled level of Gianfranco's building are crowded umbrella stands. We dry our underwear on the column heaters and I am obliged to borrow a stylish blissfully cosy cardigan from Gianfranco, who has already issued me with a spare mobile phone. Everyone is using them constantly, flicking back the tiny covers with unconscious grace.

I had expected to celebrate my birthday night at the villa, with visions of being fussed over and spoiled by ex-boyfriends and new friends. As it turned out, a wedding and two communion parties were booked for that date, so William organises a table at Nello restaurant, which had so enraptured us on our first night. Gianfranco is anxious that after dinner we come to the villa for cake and spumante.

Nello is an experience utterly unlike the first night – I feel it the second we are led to our table by the waiter. In the brightly lit buzzy dining room, it seems we are the only non-Italians, the sole
stranieri
. Without Gianfranco I am trying to improvise, unsure what to choose from the menu, chattering too brightly to the haughty distant waiter. I suppress my irritation with everything – with the waiter, with William for drinking too quickly, but above all with the fact that on this special occasion the situation is just William and I exhibiting our standard greed and not even particularly enjoying our meal.

We choose badly – my pheasant is dry, William's lamb a little tough – and even the three types of crostini we order for the beginning are less luscious than they were that first night. I conclude privately that it is less to do with the absence of Gianfranco than with my state of mind. I had so wanted a special, fancy, unforgettable birthday dinner, even if it were to be just the two of us bravely celebrating. There is a candle on my cheese platter, a redeeming touch, and then the owner insists on driving us to the villa, where the final guests are departing and the cleaning up is taking place.

In the end dining room, exhausted waiters are setting up for the staff dinner. Gianfranco is already seated and engrossed in podding broad beans, smoking ashtray at his elbow. We slide in at the long table, and in dribs and drabs the rest arrive to settle into the leisurely business of eating and drinking. Ignazio, shirt tails flapping and bow tie discarded, brings out a bottle of the Cartizze Gianfranco promised me the day we arrived, flutes are filled and a huge chocolate cake brought to the table with a spitting sizzling sparkler on top. Everyone sings
‘Tanti auguri a te, tanti auguri a te, tanti auguri a Veeky, tanti auguri a te'
and I could weep at the loveliness of it all.

The following day, grey and moist, Paolo, Silvana and I drive William into Florence to catch the train to Rome. I stand on the platform smiling fiercely at the windowed face of this exasperating, beloved friend of mine who I am suddenly missing, even before the train has pulled out. Then he is gone, and I am still standing there on the rapidly emptying platform, aware of a swelling of such freedom and possibility that I am for a moment frozen. Where do I begin? Two entire weeks of Italy, the keys to Gianfranco's mostly vacant apartment a bus ride away, a smart mobile phone, old friends to seek out or surprise, and old stamping grounds to recover.

Silvana and I begin at the little San Casciano market held every Monday near the main bus stop. Stalls create three aisles of shopping along the ridge whose dramatic drop throws up a vision of almost clichéd Tuscan countryside. I trail behind Silvana, who knows most of the stallholders, haggling, joking and filling her jewelled fingers with carrier bags in the process.

Sunlight is splintering stubbornly through the damp fuggy air, the first real sun I have seen since the day we arrived. I need everything and nothing. I dither over a pair of shoes I like, but when Silvana urges me to buy them, I change my mind. She has bought underwear, two sets of bedlinen and three boxes of shoes, and is now selecting Parmesan from the mobile cheese van. The food aisle features several of these makeshift delicatessens and I plant myself in front of each, absorbing sights and smells and enjoying the lively bargaining taking place around me. Huge wedges of several types of Parmesan, wheels of pecorino, both aged and sweet, fat plaits of creamy white mozzarella, blocks of Gorgonzola, goat's cheeses, pale craterous Emmentals: this is my vision of heaven. Alongside are cured meats, haunches of prosciutto, giant mortadellas and tiny crinkled sausages and salamis, and a whole roasted suckling pig sliced through its gorgeous lacquered coat.

Behind me I can hear Silvana's laughter peel out across the morning. I turn and watch her joke with the greengrocer, whose fingers are testing asparagus spears for firmness. Glossy zucchini and broad beans and artichoke hearts nestle alongside mangetout and green beans, aubergine and capsicum, four varieties of tomato, frilly lettuces, fat globes of fennel, bunches of celery, pert little radishes – produce so fresh I can almost hear it squeak. Silvana is now gathering me up, thrusting carrier bags into my arms, organising to meet me outside Nello at half past twelve so I can join her and Paolo for lunch.

I order a salad, Silvana, crostini and prosciutto followed by chicken; and Paolo, grilled liver. He pulls bread apart absently and reminisces about the bachelor period in his life when he sat at the same table of Nello every single day until Silvana came into his life. The talk turns to Cinzia, the only woman Gianfranco had been involved with whom he did not betray. Yet she believed that he did, terminated the relationship, somehow wrested the restaurant from his control, took it over and eventually bought out the last remaining partner.

Paolo and Silvana do not hide their contempt for her. I listen carefully and insert occasional questions. There is still much I fail to comprehend. How could she throw him out of a restaurant of his own inception, a restaurant so successful that there would be queues of people waiting to get in? How could she ensure that he received nothing at all for everything he had done? There seems no justification for such a cruel act of revenge. Paolo tells me how Gianfranco slunk away for six months to lie low, barely seeing anyone. Then the opportunity of the villa arose.

La Cantinetta is now a mere half the restaurant it once was, and mostly panders to tourists. I ask desultory questions about Gianfranco's love life, the string of women – mostly foreigners – who fall in love with him and whom he drops with regularity. The only time Gianfranco and I are really alone in the ten days I am his guest is when we go to the Metro, the vast wholesale emporium on the outskirts of Florence. When he was teaching me how to cook, we used to go regularly on shopping trips that were the stuff of fantasy and spend extravagant amounts.

This experience is both the same and different – twenty years separate us from the two people we once were. When we arrive, we procure one of the huge, ungainly trolleys and proceed up and down the aisles, me pushing and Gianfranco loading. Rounding a corner into an aisle of tropical fruits and punnets of multicoloured berries, we are suddenly standing face to face with a man so familiar, whose mouth splits into a wide smile of pleasure as he says, ‘How lovely to see you both!' We chat for several minutes, then move on and I hiss to Gianfranco that I do not remember who it is. ‘Neither do I!' he laughs. We both laugh. Afterwards I do remember his name and recall that he was a waiter at a restaurant we frequented, but it must have looked for all the world as if Gianfranco and I had been together all these years in one unbroken thread.

Being with Gianfranco this time is so comfortable, it is almost familial. Here we simply are, devoid of any of the tensions associated with sex and work, two grown-ups connected by such a fond mesh of our younger, sillier selves. It is not that I find him unattractive – dressed up as he was on the first night in smart black trousers and flowing white shirt and polished pointy boots, he was meltingly lovely – it is that I know him too well, and so the nature of the chemistry has altered. During the course of the journey, he has become enthusiastic about ways to extricate me from my ongoing impecuniousness, computes with speedy calculations how a little business of private catering could rescue me, reels off simple menus, the ideas tumbling out in his lazy Umbrian accent, the cigarette waving circles above the steering wheel. The man becoming passionate fleetingly, then losing interest, distracted quickly, but the mind, like an overexcited heart, almost audibly hammering out the rhythm of rapid thought.

Quando la pera è matura, casca da sè

All things happen in their own good time

Meanwhile, I am re-establishing contact with other people. The day William leaves I find my way down to the villa, earlier than usual, a book to keep me company. I walk into the back dining room, which to my surprise contains tables and diners, and there at the head of one is Fabio, our jack of all trades from La Cantinetta. I am enchanted and swoop into his embrace. I always loved this big bear of a man and I would periodically meet his English partner, Lidia, in Florence for coffee. Lidia is there, as well, talking with a couple I dimly recognise; a chair is pulled out for me, wine splashed into a glass, a wheel of fresh, bulgy pecorino cheese and a basket of broad beans pushed in my direction.

At a corner table sit three girls whose peals of laughter pierce the formality of the gracious room with its high ceilings and vast mirrors. Around an ice bucket they are waving their champagne flutes with animated gestures and blowing out ribbons of smoke. Lidia whispers that they are call girls from Moldavia, and suddenly the periodic visits to their table by the waiters and Gianfranco make sense. Beppe, in his bright waiter's shirt, has seated himself at their table: it has now become a compelling piece of theatre. Lank-haired Gianfranco has emerged from the kitchen, stomach sculptured into a globe by apron strings. He leans over our table, graciously hosting, before joining the call girls' table, to which my eyes drift back.

There is Ignazio with more champagne, a battery of glassware threaded through his fingers and a bow tie slipped around his unbuttoned collar, and Gianfranco is sitting down beside the quieter and plainer of the girls. I am only half concentrating on the conversation at our table – which has drifted now to that universal fascination, the price of real estate.

These girls intrigue me, with their hipless exotic exhibitionism; one is now dancing slow motion to her reflection in one of the vast wall mirrors. Platters of food remain untouched around them, and one by one the waiters are pulling up chairs and joining in. Silvana and Paolo are settling at another table and beginning their own meal. The kitchen is closing down. I sit on at my table, conscious of how staidly middle-aged we all are, of flickers of wistfulness that I am not part of that other infinitely more exciting party, a pretty young thing in my twenties with an audience of admiring men.

On one of my trips into Florence, I go searching for my old restaurant. I locate Via della Condotta and the nearby Chinese restaurant, but I am confused by these fashionable new eateries that have sprung up since I was last there. Eventually I am obliged to ask about it. The first place draws a blank, but in the second funky Japanese-themed restaurant a waiter appears old enough to remember. It has had a name change, I am told; sure enough, when I retrace my steps, there is a familiar threshold and, inside, the bar area is immediately recognisable.

In contrast, I could have found with my eyes closed the cellar-restaurant where I first met Gianfranco. I descend the steps and am struck by the sharp memories and the potent image of myself perched at a typewriter on the first level doing the daily wine lists. Further in, the warm space envelops me, and there is the owner, hair now tipped a distinguished grey and wearing fashionable glasses, coming to hug me tightly. Because I am eager to catch Sant'Ambrogio markets before they close, I only stay for a few minutes, promising to return for lunch at a later stage. As I leave, I am asked if I still make my famous cheesecakes. ‘But of course!' I smile. ‘I made one yesterday for Gianfranco.'