The Food of Love (26 page)

was selling mandolini, ewe’s milk cheeses. Bruno bought several

to keep in the van so that he didn’t have to stop every time he was hungry. He guessed he probably stank of the stuff, but he didn’t care.

From Tuscany he continued to head north, hugging the

Ligurian coastline as far as Genoa. Here he ate minestrone con

pesto, soup with fresh basil, and farinata, the staple street food of the seaport: a batter made with chickpea flour, mixed with extra virgin olive oil, water and salt, spread out on a two-foot platter and cooked quickly in a wood-fired oven. It was properly croccante

sopra e morbida sotto - crisp on the top, soft underneath - but it gave him no pleasure.

The way north left the coast for the very different landscape of Piedmont. Here long, straight roads built at the command of

imperial Caesars ran across smooth plains filled with flooded rice paddies, for this part of Italy is the largest producer of rice in the Western world. Each night, when the sun sank beneath the surface of the flood plains, he parked the van and prepared to sleep, while thousands of mosquitoes scribbled dementedly all over the windows.

When he ate it was usually a simple, soupy risotto from a

roadside osteria, the same food that the rice workers themselves ate: rice cooked with chicken or the ubiquitous frogs’ legs,

flavoured with cinnamon and made liquid with the heavy wine of

the region. Eventually, though, there was no more paddy plain left and the bristling foothills of the Alps rose up ahead of him. Now when he stopped the van the locals spoke a harsh dialect, their

speech a strange intermingling of Italian, German and French,

and the roadside cafes served boiled meats, sauerkraut and

Austrian -style pastries. He knew the van would never survive up there, in the thin mountain air and the snow, so he reluctantly

turned east towards the Adriatic coast. Here he picked up another Roman road, the Via Emilia, now known more prosaically as the

N90 but still running straight and true for hundreds of miles

across Emilia-Romagna to the sea.

This was the gastronomic heartland of Italy, where every inch

of the fertile soil was cultivated. In Parma he visited shops festooned with hams, each one postmarked with the stamps of a

dozen different inspectors - the regions of Italy are fiercely protective of their produce, and only a handful of towns between the

Enza and the Stirone rivers are allowed to designate themselves as true producers of prosciutto di Parma. Because the huge lofts in which the hams are aged are always left open to the wind, the villages of the Enza valley seemed scented with the aromatic

sweetness of the meat as he drove through them. In a valley to the north of Parma Bruno sampled culatello di zibcllo, perhaps the

greatest of all Parma’s pork products and for that reason almost never exported, even to other parts of Italy: a pig’s rump marinated in salt and spices, then sewn inside a pig’s bladder and aged

for eighteen months in the humid air of the flat river basin. It is a process so delicate that almost half the hams are spoiled before they are ready, but those which survive are incomparably delicious.

There had been a time when the almost creamy texture and

sweet, intense flavour of the meat would have made Bruno laugh

out loud for sheer joy. Now, although he still found it curious, he was like a man trying to taste from a photograph, or someone who eats with a bad cold. It was as if his palate, usually so exact, had become no more sensitive than that of any ordinary person.

He was interested, though, to see the process by which accto

balsamico tradizionale was made in Modena, just twenty miles to

the south but as different again from Parma as vinegar is from

meat. In a traditional acetaia he was allowed to peer briefly

through the door of the attic, where a dozen barrels of different sizes dripped their precious contents with infinitesimal slowness into open buckets lined with brown paper. The air was heady with grape must, and even the songbirds that clustered at the open

window seemed stunned into silence by the thick, viscous aroma.

For an exorbitant fee Bruno was given a coffee-spoon-sized

mouthful of the fifty-year-old vinegar to sip. As rich as old cognac, perfectly balanced between sweet and sour, the taste was so powerful that it seemed to flood through his chest like medicine. But

it gave him no pleasure, and since even a tiny 100 ml bottle cost many hundreds of euros, he drove on without buying any.

In another village he stopped to buy cheese, and watched the

two owners of the dairy as they whisked a huge tank containing

hundreds of gallons of whey with a spino, a whisk as big as a broom.

It was backbreaking work that at the end of the day would yield just two large cheeses, although it would be another three years before they would be ready to be sold. However, the same dairy also

made slattato, a soft, fresh ewe’s cheese, which he ate rolled up in a piece of piadina - a flat tortilla-like bread - for nourishment.

As Bruno neared the sea the little road became crowded with

tourists spilling off the autostrada, heading for the fashionable resorts around Rimini. It was time to change direction again. This time Bruno set the van’s nose south west, once more heading

inland.

He had been driving for weeks, but he had never experienced

such an empty, rural landscape as the one in which he now found

himself. This was Le Marche: the Marches. There were few major

towns here. For mile after mile the only signs of life were tiny hamlets and villages, dotted between the wild limestone gorges,

where peasant farmers scratched a living much as they had always done, tending a few pigs, a few cows and a few sheep on a couple of steep fields. The roads tended to be winding, following the

contours of the land and the serpentine rivers, and Bruno made

slow progress. That suited him fine, though. It was becoming

apparent that unless he stopped somewhere, and perhaps got himself a job as a labourer, he was eventually going to end up back in

Rome again, where all roads led, and that was the last place he

wanted to be. Almost as if it sensed its driver’s mood, the van

began to slow down, so that even when he did come across a

stretch of straight road he was unable to travel at more than fifty’

kilometres an hour without gusts of black smoke belching from

the old vehicle’s patched-up guts.

Bruno picked up another Roman road, the Via Flaminia, which

took him through the dramatic Eurlo gorge. The road was

squeezed alongside the river by towering cliffs, just as it had been ever since it was built in 220 BC, and even though the traffic was light he was soon holding up behind him a queue of impatient

drivers. After the three-kilometre darkness of the Furlo tunnel, also built in Roman times, he pulled off at the first turning and drove upwards, into the hills. Here there was no traffic at all.

Eagles spun lazily overhead, and once he thought he heard the

distant howl of a wolf.

As he climbed higher above Acqualagna the van began first to

breathe heavily and then to wheeze, all the time going more and

more slowly; until finally, with a coughing fit worthy of a forty-a day smoker, it came to a complete stop.

Bruno got out and contemplated the silent engine. He was

about three hundred feet above the valley floor, somewhere

between the little towns of Cagli and Citta di Castello. He could not, however, see a single house or farm. It was deathly quiet. The sound of goat bells clattering in the distance as their owners

methodically chewed at a meadow indicated, however, that there

was some sort of settlement nearby. The fields, too, although tiny, were clearly well cared for. Underneath each tree was a tidy stack of firewood, piled up to dry for the winter, and the rows of vines in the pocket-sized vineyards were heavy with ripening fruit.

He tried in vain to coax the engine back to life. Once he

thought he had it, but the van seemed to splutter apologetically and then lapse back into its coma. Sighing, Bruno pulled his backpack from the passenger seat and prepared to walk. Since he knew

there was nothing for miles the way he had come, he walked

uphill, hoping that the woods which obscured his view were also

concealing the presence, somewhere, of a village.

Tommaso’s evening had been a disaster. By the time the last diners left, only partially mollified by several free digestivi, he was just about ready to collapse. But there were still the books to be done.

Glumly he emptied a box of crumpled invoices on to one of the

tables.

‘The thing is,’ Marie explained, ‘we’re still getting in food from our suppliers, who are still expecting to be paid, and on top of that there’s the mafia’s four per cent. But there’s no money coming in.

What’s more, all those freebies we have to hand out are costing us a fortune. And because the waiters aren’t getting any tips, they’re skimming off the top. Every night we open for business simply

adds to our debt. We need to shut down now, before we lose Dr

Ferrara any more of his investment.’

Tommaso sighed. ‘If the waiters are skimming us, let’s get rid of the waiters. It’s not as if there’s anything for them to do anyway’

‘What about the commisV

Tommaso hesitated. The two commis were youngsters, fresh

out of catering school, but at least they had some idea of what

they were doing, unlike himself. ‘We’ll keep one of them,’ he suggested as a compromise.

Marie punched some buttons on her calculator. ‘We’ll still be

losing money,’ she said gloomily. ‘We can’t even pay Dr Ferrara his next instalment of the capital.’

‘I’ll pay him out of my savings.’

, ‘Don’t be stupid.’

“I don’t want this place to close, Marie.’

‘You’re sentimental about it,’ she commented. ‘That’s dangerous, for a business.’

‘You don’t have to stay yourself if you don’t want to.’

‘That’s different,’ she said gruffly.

After she had gone, Tommaso sat for a long time going

through the bills, looking in vain for some way of cutting the

operating costs and returning II Cuoco to profit. Even he, though, could see that it was hopeless. They simply spent too much and

made too little.

After Bruno had left Rome, Tommaso’s anger had evaporated

as quickly as it had come. In fact, he soon started to feel a little guilty. What he had said to Bruno was certainly true - Bruno had kissed his girl behind his back - but given that he himself had been unfaithful to the same girlfriend with a pretty blonde backpacker from Munich, he suspected that he was hardly entitled to claim

the moral high ground. Besides, Tommaso loved Bruno, and the

harsh words had been as much from his own sense of hurt that he

hadn’t been told the whole story as from any real injured pride.

As the realisation had slowly dawned that Bruno wasn’t coming

back, Tommaso had sunk into gloom, along with the fortunes of

H Cuoco. Had the restaurant not by now owed money to everyone

from Dr Ferrara to the mafia, he might have tried to walk

away from it. But gradually he realised that there was another

reason why he couldn’t leave. It was to do with the look on

Marie’s face when she’d discovered that he wasn’t a real chef. He was determined to show her, and the rest of Rome as well, that he Was just as capable of running a restaurant as Bruno had been. But the truth, at this moment, seemed to be that he wasn’t.

The nights had been the worst. That was when Laura had found

herself thinking that she actually couldn’t stand the pain; that she would do anything, anything at all, if only Tommaso would take

her back; that she would even share him with all the tourists in Rome if it meant she could be with him again. On nights like

those she would sit numbly on her bed, leaning against the wall, and wait for the morning, her cheeks burning with humiliation

and her eyes stinging with wretchedness.

She had cried all the time. She had cried all over Judith, and on the phone to Carlotta. She had come within a whisker of abandoning her course and going back to America. She had cried over the

student counsellor, who had arranged for her to see a doctor, who in turn had prescribed anti-depressants. She had cried over Kim

Fellowes. He had been sympathetic, arranging to see her privately to help her catch up; at which kindness, of course, she had simply cried some more. He did not seem to be in the least repelled by her tears: if anything, the more she cried, the more attentive he became, and she soon got used to the familiar comforting smell of the cologne on his elegant linen handkerchiefs. Gradually the pain receded, and when, finally, he had escorted her to his bed, she realised how lucky she was to be loved at last by someone who genuinely cared for her.

Bruno walked uphill for over an hour. Although the sun was setting it was still hot, and only dogged determination, and the

knowledge that if he didn’t find somewhere to stay he was going

to have to sleep out in the open, kept him going.

Eventually he saw houses in the distance. There was a plume of

smoke beyond them, as straight and upright in the windless air as the cypress trees that dotted the hillside. As he climbed higher he saw that it was indeed a tiny village, consisting of no more than a dozen or so stone houses. On one of the buildings there was an

ancient advertisement for Fernet Branca, painted directly on to the crumbling plaster. That was a good omen: it meant there was

probably some kind of osteria.

As he walked into the village a couple of dogs on chains barked

at him, but otherwise the place seemed deserted. But he could