Amore and Amaretti (7 page)

I know that Venice is considered almost lyrical in its loveliness, beloved of poets and writers throughout history. Thomas Mann said, ‘To enter Venice by train is like entering a palace by the back door.' And a palace it is, although a palace whose richness and beauty is best appreciated outside of winter. For my first Christmas alone – no Gianfranco, friends otherwise occupied – I decide that I will distract myself by spending a week in Venice. I book myself into an inexpensive family-run pensione, and begin to feel excited.

It is the coldest winter Italy has experienced in decades. I am undeterred. I catch the train, arriving at the palace by the back door – and am nearly blown out of the compartment by the force of the icy wind. Because stoicism, a strong family trait, comes easily to me, I embrace the appalling weather as part of my next exciting adventure, the unconventional Christmas I will never forget. The fact that my pensione is shabby and austere – a single sagging bed in a narrow room with bidet and a solitary hook for my clothes – seems to render the adventure even greater. I check in and then spend a pleasurable time settling in, arranging toiletries on the shelf above the washbasin, alarm clock beside the bed, nightie under the musty pillow. Then it is time to launch into the outside world and explore this extraordinary city.

Years before I had come with a friend on a day in spring, a day trip of sunshine and magic. Over endless little bridges we loped, bewitched by the maze of mysterious little streets, the entrancing, majestic architecture, the thousands of pigeons in the Piazza San Marco – we even had the obligatory, outrageously priced coffee at Harry's Bar – but most of all by the fact that this was a city which floated on water, was built on water, would one day be overpowered and swallowed up by water. We knew it was a cliché, but could not help being infected by the joy on the faces of the newly wed couple posing for photographs in a gondola.

This time it is so utterly different I could be in another place altogether, except that it is all still there: the canals and the bridges, the architecture and the piazzas, the majesty and the mystery. The water is all choppy, angry waves whipped into peaks by the wind, which never drops. Few people are out, and those who dare are wrapped in eminently more sensible clothing than I – the sort of clothing you wear at a ski resort, perhaps. And, to be sure, there is snow – dirty yellow heaps of it piled in corners. All I want to do is get out of the wind so that I can think, compose myself, recover my good humour, plan where I will go for my evening meal. I erupt gratefully into a bar and ponder my possibilities. It is early afternoon and grey, grey, grey, and I have at least five hours before a lovely dinner somewhere can rescue me. I know there are the Doge's Palace and the Campanile and the Rialto Market within walking distance; there are literary walks I could set out on and Tintorettos everywhere to marvel at. All of these things on a mild calm day I would exuberantly do, and yet looking out the window of the bar at the bleak, unpopulated landscape the only way I can think to cheer myself up is to return to the pensione and slide into bed with a book.

In bed with a book is mostly how the first three days of my Christmas in Venice pass. The icy wind becomes a permanent part of each day I so optimistically rise and prepare for. It drives me out of the pensione and into a shop, bar, café or restaurant from whose warm interiors I never want to emerge. Spending so much money in these refuges means I spend increasing time in the narrow lumpy bed, reading gloomily. I cheer up briefly around six o'clock in the evening, when I sit perched and purposeful in a snug little trattoria, reading the menu over a carafe of house wine, scribbling down brooding thoughts and observations in my notebook, sliding the day back into perspective.

On the fourth day I can bear it no longer. I am miserable – the sun has not appeared once in all that time – and homesick for my funny little cupboard of a bedroom in Florence, for my sweet flatmates with whom I visualise sharing Pandoro and spumante in the Christmas spirit I so shockingly do not feel. Florence could not possibly be as vacant and joyless as Venice for a lonely woman alone. I do not even consider the waste of the week paid for as I board the train home.

It is the end of the year, and both Gianfranco's restaurant and I' Che C'è C'è have planned special banquets for New Year's Eve. We are fully booked. Most of the day I am in the kitchen with Maurizio and Emba preparing complicated antipasti, creamy smoked salmon sauces for pasta, cannelloni stuffed with nutmeggy ricotta and spinach,
cotechino
(pork sausage) with lentils and roasted game, anchovy sauce to eat with steak. Emba is making her famous orange biscotti: dough pungent with orange rind, rolled into coils, then deep-fried to a sticky gold crispness. I have an irresistible urge to see Gianfranco halfway through the day to find out how his preparations are going. I suspect he is lunching, as he mostly does, at Vecchia Toscana, and so I set off, grateful to be away from the steamy, hectic kitchen for half an hour or so. As I approach the restaurant, I see Marie-Claire's bicycle leaning against the wall by the entrance. When I find Gianfranco, in one of the dining rooms, she is sitting next to him eating lunch, and one of her legs coils around his, like a snake.

Piero decides to replace his head chef the evening Maurizio pushes through the beaded curtains separating the kitchen from the dining room and threads his way between crowded tables to the front door, where he exits for the Piazza Signora and a fix. It is
mezzo servizio
, the middle of service: the restaurant is full and I am alone in the kitchen except for David, the Israeli dishwasher, and a pile of orders to be filled, which we somehow bluff our way through. The dining customers have no idea that the meals sent out have been cobbled together by an assistant chef and the ‘dish-pig' because the head chef has left the premises.

A series of chefs come to I' Che C'è C'è, clutching their toolboxes filled with knives. They spend a day each in our small kitchen, showing off their technical skills, while Emba and I hover anxiously, feeling homespun and shabby and disliking them all. Only one of them teaches me something useful, which is to take a whisk to those tinned tomatoes still stubbornly retaining their shape after half an hour simmering toward a sauce. For all their trade certificates, none of them seems capable of the
casalinga
– homely – touch for which we are known and loved… until Fabrizio presents himself.

Fabrizio is a short, neat man whose late middle age has been tidied away beneath tinted glasses and a hairpiece. He dresses impeccably in starched whites and his movements are crisp and economical. Emba and I adore him immediately, and so he is hired. We quickly learn that he is married but has a lover in the outer Florentine suburb of Sesto Fiorentino. The fact that he tipples away at cooking wine is unimportant. When he is a little drunk, he inserts one index finger into his right cheek, pops it out with a small explosion and announces,
‘Sciampagna per tutti'
– Champagne all round. Another one of his sayings, after he has created a dish of which he is especially proud, is
‘Nemmeno in Giappone lo fanno cosi!'
– not even in Japan do they make it like this! And after a while the rest of us adopt ‘
Stentalett
', his invented, meaningless term of affection. Fabrizio cooks calmly, with an air of irony and detachment. Some afternoons he steps down from the kitchen to greet a thick-set woman whose large black handbag clutched to her chest seems to want to hide her. They are brief and formal together, and when Fabrizio returns to the kitchen, he murmurs,
‘Sesto Fiorentino,'
and winks.

Into the Via de' Barbadori apartment move the Israeli dishwasher and his sewing machine. We are amiably overcrowded and yet somehow retain our little territories, our separate lives. One student eats formally prepared meals on his own, snapping off neat segments of the hollow bread rolls he loves before retiring to his bedroom to discuss projects with fellow students around his architect's table. The other is soft and blond and lazy, and leaves the apartment around ten o'clock most evenings to go
in giro –
cruise around – with his more fashionable friends, usually ending up at discotheques.

David the Israeli dishwasher and I discover a great point of intimacy: ice cream. Talking about ice cream reveals surprising areas of David's soul, a soul I otherwise think of as bruised and blackened as old fruit in this taciturn and hardened ex-soldier. A stocky man balding young, he walks bent forward, looking hunted and furtive. His clothes – tight jeans, loose polo necks, bulky jackets with padded shoulders and obscure labels stitched to the sleeves – are all black. Pointed black shoes tap out at right angles as he walks over the bridge to Gailli
gelateria
and takes his place alongside the line of ice cream buyers in front of the window. His favourites are chocolate mousse, chocolate
stracciatella
and a particularly alcoholic flavour based on rum. Three scoops are smeared into a paper cup and stabbed with a tiny plastic spoon, coins transferred, and David is tapping back over the bridge. The ice cream is finished before he has arrived back at the apartment, a few minutes' walk away. This is not only the best ice cream in Florence, it is the best ice cream in the world.

One mid-afternoon, the sun is slanting through the slats of Venetian blinds and running stripes down David's black T-shirt. He is sitting at the vintage sewing machine he bought when he decided that it was fashion rather than stage sets he wished to design, head bent over the chattering needle and oblivious to my entrance, the fabric bunched up and spilling off the polished old wood of the machine.

When David was a soldier in the Israeli army, he once stormed into a hotel and shot a man dead. Maybe there were others he killed – maybe after he has seen my look of horror, he decides not to tell me about the others. We do not know each other very well. I have never met someone who has killed another person: it is the first thing I know about David and seems to explain his tough, squat body and premature balding, his black attire, the endless cigarettes he hand-rolls, an absence of smiling and rare laughter behind closed teeth; hands plunged in pockets while taking coffee at a bar standing silent amongst strangers. He has hard, pale eyes and hollow cheeks, a stony, chiselled beauty but an unapproachability. I see the young, raw drama student painting sets and dreaming of theatre and flamboyant costumes tossed suddenly into war. One day he kills a man with a rifle blast and ever after carries around that one, sharp shot that hardens the line of his jaw.

There we both are one August evening, lined up together at the Gailli window. Through the glass are the stainless-steel tubs containing ice cream whipped to glossy peaks, studded with nuts, chocolate, angelica, cherries, toffee, caramel, laced with liqueurs, luridly pink and green and gold and purple, white like snow, rippled with berries. I am attempting to control my greed as I select flavours. David, who has no inhibitions where ice cream is concerned, is simply selecting flavours.

Walking back home over the bridge to the apartment (which up until then we have shared politely as strangers) we spoon ice cream into our mouths and become friends. Finding someone who shares your passion is almost like falling in love. Enthusiasm bounces back and forth between us, radiating the air – our smiles are rich with understanding. The details to discuss are myriad: I can suddenly confide my thoughts on texture and temperature, our ice cream conversations intense as we describe the eating sensation as we might describe love-making.