The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (17 page)

‘A week. Last Thursday up near the
orto
,' Filiberto reminds her, but she's rooting about in her sweater pocket among the herbs and weeds for The Gypsy Kings. She can't see the buttons on her tiny machine and so hands it to me to put into action. A shepherd, a Venetian, Iacovo the farmer and Sean Connery assemble and, as is the rural Umbrian way for men to dance, they stand in a circle, hold one another's elbows and, as though they hear another kind of music, stamp their feet and kick their legs, move in some aboriginal
tarantella
, as much Russian and Greek as Italian. We women pair off and trot about on the gravel, our arms moving like the blades of a windmill and I see the scene as from a distance and I think
how lovely this is
,
how unbearably lovely
. Long before the tape ends, we stop, gather closer together and I am certain this is the moment when Niccolò will make his announcement. Rather it's he who rounds up the tribe and guides us back to the table.

La torta al mosto
is rich, properly underbaked so it's as much pudding as cake. Slicing skinny pieces, I am named a miser and so I cut again. I try to count up the litres of wine with which we have made this supper and those we've drunk with it. I stop counting, let my thoughts wander back to the boy with the violin. To my son and Paganini. To Niccolò in the kilt. Neither he nor Paolina, save her flush, has exhibited any but the most usual behaviour. It's Miranda who insists that Paolina leave her auto at the rustico, allow Niccolò to drive her home.

‘Stay abed tomorrow. I'll stop by and …'

‘
Mirandina
, I'm quite well and …'

Paolina never uses the tender diminutive of Miranda's name as do we others. Miranda takes note, says nothing more. Gilda begins to gather the last of the dishes from the table but Miranda waves her back into her chair, scans the table, pausing to stare at each of us until she turns back to Gilda whose hand she has taken into hers. Laughing, Miranda makes glittering slits of her blue-black eyes.

‘In the first half of your life, you have the face with which you were born; in the second half you have the face you've merited. I think that's it. It occurs to me, maybe not often enough, that you are a fine-looking tribe. How many things do I save to tell you? Things I've always wanted you to know. Why do I count on your already knowing them? I should remember to
say
the words. Those words.
Quanto vi voglio bene, ragazzi
. How much I love you.'

We stay quiet until I – mostly because my throat's too tight to let out a word – softly, slowly pound my hands upon the table. One by one, two by two, the others take up the ritual demonstration of honour.

Still plaintive, Miranda speaks over the commotion, ‘So you think it's Athropos who decides? I mean, about when our time's up? When to cut the thread?' Her gaze far away, her voice is very small.

‘
Amore mio
, please, enough for tonight.' Filiberto beseeches her with not quite feigned dismay.

‘Oh, I don't intend to get back to God and the
sublime ethics
of Jesus or witchcraft, though I will say that over these past few days I've wondered about old Giuseppe and what became of him while Mary was off ascending and being assumed. History's made mostly of empty spaces. In any case, I've had to rethink my image of Death after being reminded of those three women who sit somewhere spinning and snipping and … I've always thought of death as The Horseman. My father used to call him that:
quel Cavaliere Nero
, that black Horseman. Intimately and often, my father spoke of him. A long-time nemesis who lived just over the hill. I have always feared a man on a black horse.'

‘In
Il Gattopardo
, Don Fabrizio saw Death as a handsome woman in a brown travelling suit. She came to sit by his bed in the hotel, do you remember?' I say this but do not say that I fear a woman in a brown suit.

‘With her sitting beside him, Fabrizio told himself he'd lived the sum of three happy weeks in his life. By which, I suppose, he meant he was tranquil about leaving with her.' Paolina says this with spare conviction.

‘A few perfect days. I've had a whole handful of them, more than most, I think. No one has a right to more. Most days are made of something less than and something more than
happiness
.' Miranda's voice is a whisper.

‘
Già
, indeed.' The tribe is in harmony.

A pair of candles he'd taken earlier from the armoire and tucked in his jacket pocket for just this moment, Fernando lights them now as the others burn away. Filiberto takes up his mandolin and tonight his hoarse whispery voice lulls Miranda. Her snoring a whistle, faint, steady, she sleeps as we do the washing up, smother the ashes, gather our things.
Buonanotte
.

Filiberto helps Miranda into his truck and I watch them, wonder about them. Does he stay with her in her house in Castelpietro? Does she stay with him in his house, which sits beyond the farthest meadow off the Montefiescone road? Once a
fenile
, a stone hay barn, it's where he makes cheese, births lambs and tends the ailing ones, where he shears sheep, where he cooks and washes and eats and sleeps. Maybe the goddess of Buonrespiro is right: maybe the good half of a love is enough.

As we drive home, I wonder if the boy with the violin will pass through Orvieto again. I am happy that Gilda has so gracefully snitched the black velvet hat. Will Paolina marry Niccolò?

Late on Friday morning, Paolina calls: ‘The rustico wants a good cleaning. We were all so tired last night, I don't even remember if we scrubbed the pots. Shall we take care of things together? Maybe tomorrow? Niccolò and his mates from San Severo are going to Rome on the 11:05. Did Fernando tell you that he'd invited him to go along? Pierangelo as well. Armando al Pantheon for lunch, a walk in the Villa Borghese, back to the train. They'll be home in time to take you and Ninuccia and I for
aperitivi
and then to la Palomba for supper.'

‘Fernando is, at this moment, upstairs trying on jackets he hasn't worn since Venice. He's so pleased …'

‘You know he'd asked Niccolò if you and I and Ninuccia might go along but Niccolò wouldn't have it. Just as well. Tomorrow, at about eleven.'

•

On Saturday I leave Fernando at the train station, arrive at the rustico just before eleven-thirty to find Paolina on her knees scrubbing the floor.

‘It was a ruse. Asking you to help me. All of it done in less than an hour. I haven't lit the stove or the hearth fire. It's so warm today …'

‘Come with me then, we'll finish that later. I didn't bring anything for breakfast. Or lunch. Emergency Venchi 85 per cent cacao, three bars in the glove box.'

‘We may need it.'

We take up our places prone among the weeds on the edge of Miranda's
oliveto
and smoke Paolina's hand-rolled cigarettes.

‘Do you want to know if I've
accepted
him?'

‘I suppose I do. Yes, I do.'

‘I'll wait to tell you. I'll wait until I've told you other things.'

•

Why can't she just say, I did or I didn't? Yes or no? I wonder as I look at Paolina who seems concentrated on her cigarette, taking it out of her mouth after each inhalation, holding it first close up, then farther away, pondering it as though the ‘other things' she wishes to tell me were written on its thin white paper. It's only after she bashes the last millimetre of it on a stone and drops the spent end of it in her metal box that Paolina begins.

‘Like a keening wraith, I roved about the rooms of the house where I was born, opening and slapping shut the doors, thinking if I opened them once again, he would be there. She would.'

As she lifts her gaze from a place somewhere in the weeds a streak of sunlight flickers across her eyes, illuminating the tears she'd thought to hide. She sits up, fiddles with a boot buckle. I sit up, caress her arm sooner than speak. After a while, it's she who does.

‘
Sto bene
. I'm fine. Only, only a moment. I'm fine.'

Paolina tells me that she, an only child of only children, was not quite eighteen when the young black-bearded man who was her father died while ploughing the dark red earth of a tobacco field. On a Saturday it was when Paolina's father died, a week to the day after her mother – ill and choosing not to linger – had hurried herself away.

‘Until almost the end of her days, my mother still ran my bath in the evening, woke me in the morning with a
buongiorno principessa
in falsetto, setting down on my bedside table a tray with a china pot of caffé latte and two croissants fat with marzipan, crusted with roasted almonds and still warm from the pasticceria.
Amore mio, come hai dormito?
My love, how did you sleep?

‘Though my father's was a more reticent love, together their devotion commanded me, their authority so congenial I was breathless to resist. Mine had been a life measured out in the melodious two-note chime of meekness and reward. I was their
good girl
. And then they were gone. No matter how many times I opened and shut the doors, I was alone. Save for ‘uncle' Niccolò.

‘Tall, broad, mercurial as a god was Niccolò back then. Like chunks of sky were his eyes and I loved the smell of his tweeds, smoked as they were in the burley ash of the Brebbia he held between his teeth even as he spoke. Even as he sucked and chewed on the little red pastilles flavoured with
ratanhia root
which he'd pinch from a silver matchbox tucked in the pocket of his vest. As though a companion shade swung a thurible in his wake, when Niccolò went away, the smell of him faded slow as incense. My father's patron, my mother's paladin, our personal banker, oftentimes our chef, Niccolò had been – for as long as I could remember – the perpetrator of small ecstacies, mostly gastronomic. And as my parents commanded me, just as benignly and consummately did Niccolò command them.

‘As Niccolò's
fattore di fiducia
– trusted foreman – it was my father who kept in efficient production the small empire that composed his friend's legacy: wheat fields and sheepfolds, plantations of tobacco and sunflowers, groves of olives and vineyards. With my father taking care of things for him, Niccolò was free to indulge his passions for the markets and the caffés and the
trattorie
. For his paramours. Back then, though, I'd known nothing of
paramours
.

‘Unexpected, unannounced, Niccolò was wont to tramp through the front hall and into our dining room of an evening just as we were sitting down to supper. He being our Elijah, my mother would set a place for him at every meal. Sometimes he'd just pull up his chair and make himself at home, grinning and rubbing together his hands as my mother helped him to the food, my father to the wine. But on other evenings he'd march in and begin snatching up plates and glasses, corking wine, wrapping the bread in a napkin. “
Andiamo
. Let's go.”

‘“Let's go? Where?” My mother would shout, throwing up her hands, while my father – his acquiesence to Niccolò a matter of routine – simply rose from his chair, went to turn off the oven and then to find his jacket.

‘Once I remember Niccolò pulling a corked, dark glass bottle from his coat pocket, ‘
Ecco
, behold, oil just pressed, just robbed from my own mill. Tomorrow is soon enough for
pastasciutta
. I booked Roncalli.
Forza, forza
, I've left the auto running …

‘“It's an hour to Foligno, Niccolò,” my mother whined.

‘“What do you care? I've
salame
in the other pocket and wine in the boot.”

‘“But why? Everything is here and …”

‘“Because there will never be another Friday evening at eight o'clock on November 29, 1959. That's why.
Forza
.”

‘My mother would strip off her pinafore, run to get her good shoes, lean over the sideboard checking herself in the mirror above it while she kicked off her slippers and slid into the suede pumps she wore to church. The points of her cheeks gone red like rosehips, she'd press her hands to her hair, deepening the already deep blonde waves of it while Niccolò stood there holding out her coat, telling her she would have made Botticelli crazy. Cinderella wrenched from her hearth was my mother, tantalised by a fleshly prince bent on a 10-centimetre Chianina beef steak barely warmed over an olivewood fire. I remember wishing Niccolò would hold out my coat for me. Wishing my own cheeks would go red as rosehips. And wishing my mother was like other mothers.

‘Niccolò would bury Norcia truffles in a sack of rice and place it, like an icon, on a shelf in the kitchen. He'd turn back to us, to my mother and me, and say, ‘The rice will be properly perfumed by Tuesday. I'll bring everything else. Everything. Your job is to set the table and to be beautiful.
Basta.
'

‘He always looked at my mother when he said the part about being beautiful.

‘In the post basket hung on the front door, he'd leave a branch of peach blossom or one of tiny pomegranates, their broken skins bleeding juice the colour of Spanish wine. A just-slaughtered and dressed suckling lamb hung around his neck like a scarf, a haunch of deer in a sack slung over his shoulder, under his arm, a brown satin box with glacéed chestnuts nestling in the folds of its black velvet lining, it was Niccolò's doing that by the time I was ten or so – and he was twenty-something – it was already difficult for me to separate one appetite from another. One hunger from another. I loved to eat. I loved
zio
Niccolò.

‘As I've said, I was just shy of eighteen when my parents died and in the early days of grieving, Niccolò was my refuge. Burrowing my face into the man-smelling tweed of his coat, his great brown hands caressing my hair, I waited for him to tilt my chin up to him, to press his lips to my forehead. When he moved his hands from my hair to my breasts, I looked straight at him, into his eyes like chunks of sky. I wept and I smiled. I remember looking behind him, as though to make sure she wasn't there. My mother with the rosehip cheeks and the Botticelli face, a strap of her sundress slipping down over the white marble of her shoulder, little beads of sweat glossing her upper lip as she rolled the
umbricelli
– one by one – across the wooden board while Niccolò sat watching her. No, she wasn't there. My rival was no more. Thin solace for the loss of a mother was my victory. Bitter recompense, I thought, pushing my face deeper into Niccolò's chest, trying not to ask myself if losing her was precisely what I'd longed for.