The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (24 page)

I rise to tidy up what few things we've used. Now that we've broken its seal, I bring what's left in the jar of pears out to the cheese hut where its cooler. When I come back inside, Paolina is on her way out the door.

‘Where are you off …?'

‘Going up to Bazzica to use the phone. Niccolò will be home by now. Fernando, too, I would think. I'll call Ninuccia and she'll do the rest.'

‘What
rest?
'

‘Tell everyone to come here. Miranda and Filiberto and Gilda and Iacovo … I'd much rather have some little supper here than go out this evening. Wouldn't you?'

‘Beppa's soup?'

‘I think that was it. I'll be right back. Maybe Signora Bazzica has some eggs.'

I throw a lit match onto the wood and coal and crumpled newsprint that Miranda has layered into her old iron stove. Fanning the fire into life, I move the heavy iron plate halfway over the pot hole. I laugh to myself, thinking of the era when I moved on the line in front of all those eight- and ten-burner Wolfs and Vikings, shaking sauté pans, distilling broths, splashing in some wine, a little butter for gloss. Swirl and pour. Two donalds under the lights – two orders of duck, waiting to be served. Now, all those lifetimes later, I am here in a strange little dwelling a few kilometres beyond nowhere in a kitchen with a bedsheet curtain, coaxing the flames in a hundred-year-old stove over which I'll boil water and herbs into a soup on a Saturday night in Umbria.

It will want most of an hour before the stove is hot enough and so I look about for something to do meanwhile. Even though there's a great sheaf of sage hanging, half dried, by the kitchen door, I stick a candle in a lantern, and wander back out into the meadow to look for a few fresh leaves. I think of the soup Niccolò fed to Paolina when she was grieving and of the soup Ninuccia's mother-in-law made with stones in the desolation of the Aspromonte. Of the pap Beppa's mother was fed under the umbrella pine.
Acquacotta
. Cooked water. Tonight I will ladle it out for an assortment of old-guard Umbrian countrywomen and some of their men, none of whom wear Alaïa extra-small or Gucci loafers with no socks. I, too, am astonished by my fortune.

When I return to the rustico with a pocketful of herbs, Paolina is there. I see that she has been crying.

‘What is it? What …?'

‘Everything's fine. I stayed with Signora Bazzica until Ninuccia telephoned me back. You know, after she'd called the others. Signora Bazzica had seven eggs from this morning. Eight left from yesterday. She put them all in the same sack so we won't know who will get the day-old ones. Everyone's coming. Everyone's bringing something. Ninuccia was happy. Niccolò and Fernando have already gone to fetch Miranda and will stop by for Gilda. They'll all be here within the hour. I'll make a
dolce
. You make the soup.'

Who knows why but her tears bring on mine and we stand there weeping and smiling, taking turns starting and stopping to speak until Paolina says,

‘So it's the ending you don't yet know. Only that. The various endings.'

‘Paolina …'

‘I want to hear the ending myself. I want to hear it, yet I don't know my way in the place beyond words. For myself more than for you, I will go there. I'll try.'

Paolina walks about the kitchen, pulling out the elements she'll need for the
dolce
. She scrubs the wooden table, dries it vigorously, dries it again, measures flour directly onto it, forms a well in the flour. With the tips of her fingers she begins mixing in butter, sugar, egg yolk, milk. She salts the mass with a marble-shooter's flick and mixes again. Her hands fly over the mass, touching it but almost not touching it and, in less than a minute, she forms a satiny paste, slaps it into a flat, perfect oval and covers it gently with a fresh white cloth. She pats the cloth. She looks up at me.

‘It's as though I'd spent my whole life with Umberto and Carolina. Thirty-four years if we speak in linear time. But in a real way I live with them still. Nothing maudlin, nothing macabre, what I mean is that I think many of us tend to live always in whatever was the best period of our lives. We set up the next epoch, wittingly or not, by re-creating the earlier one, the golden one. And my sons have done the same; their households reflect how we lived together in the parish house: open doors, long tables, endless suppers, fiery discussions with not a whiff of taboo, a peculiar alchemy of rules and liberty, communal esteem. Trials made us stronger. A true test of family.'

A bowl of old bruised figs is in the armoire. Shooing away the fruit flies, I dump them out on a space near where Paolina has just worked, scoop out their flesh, add black sugar and vin santo. I have no idea what we'll do with it but I need to keep working through what must be three or four minutes of Paolina's silence. She washes her hands, makes room for me at the sink, hands me a towel.

‘Luigia went back to live in Rome. I think it was just after Pioggia was born. She was failing and she chose to do so privately, making a grand appearance on the first Sunday of each month when Umberto's driver would go to fetch her. We'd run to the front garden to meet the old black Chrysler. We'd pull her gently from her prop of yellow cushions, taking care not to crush the two green- and silver-wrapped packages that the pastrybaker at Muzzi would loop over each of her wrists. He told us once how she would walk away after he performed this service, stiff as a soldier, arms held out like wings so as not to disturb her sugary loot and go then to stand in front of the shop to wait for Umberto's driver. She wasn't there on the sidewalk at Muzzi one Sunday. Luigia died in her sleep, just as she'd always said she would.

‘The boys were fifteen, thirteen, ten and six when Carolina died. The love between their
nonna
and my sons was an epic love, a reciprocal adoration. Retrieving a ritual that had fallen out of vogue for generations, the San Severese – en masse and to the haunting drone of a lone Abruzzese piper – walked behind Carolina's hearse from the parish house through the narrow streets of the village, across the piazza and to the church. After mass we carried her casket together, Domenica, Mezzanotte, Pioggia, Umberto and I. Roverscio rode, sobbing, atop Domenica's shoulders.

‘I will try to tell you of Umberto's passing. It was nearly six years ago, nearly six. He was at home and I was with him. The forewarnings of his leaving were not long. Not unlike my mother – though surely not in her manner – he dispensed with all notions of clinging to life. He'd stopped coming down to meals not more than a week before the evening when he asked me to sit with him until he slept. I did that. I closed his eyes, lit candles near his head and his feet, opened the windows and stayed with him until dawn. He'd left a box of letters for me, forty to be exact, written over the years, the last declaring – no commanding – his desire for a family celebration with nothing to mark his position in the Church. As I informed his colleagues of Umberto's death, so did I inform them of his wishes. Neverminding the wishes and my plea to honour them, the Curia set about staging the pageant it deemed appropriate. I was of little strength to fight the Church and I admit to wavering, myself, about the wisdom of sending Umberto off with a country funeral. But Niccolò would not permit Umberto to be betrayed. Niccolò was Umberto's cavalier. No fear of the Curia, Niccolò dictated and no one defied.

‘At the funeral mass, the bishop – dressed in a simple black soutane – sat in a remote corner of the church with a contingent of priests from Rome. He and they, not unnoticed. At the sound of the sanctus they walked in single file to the altar, waited their turn to receive the holy eucharist and then, forming a tight knot, they stayed together in the front of the church. When the mass was finished, the group moved swiftly to surround the bier, Niccolò and the boys, joining them with a precision that could only have been conspired. Over their bowed heads, the priest who'd said the mass, a newly ordained Fransiscan, waved the censer, raising it higher and higher, swinging it as if it were the bell to heaven and he would announce the arrival of his old mentor. Midst plumes of frankincense, the bishop and the priests, his life's rival and his beloved ‘sons', all together, they lifted Umberto the Jesuit to their shoulders. I did not bear Umberto's coffin on my own shoulder as I had Carolina's. I walked behind it. Like a daughter. Like a wife. The congregation were on their feet then and, in a rare, pure syntony, they began, slowly, powerfully, to applaud. During that long march down the aisle of the church, the scraps of odium that may have endured toward Umberto, toward me or any of his
own
, were washed away in the tears of the San Severese, obliterated in the unwavering beat of their hands. A family is made of love. Only sometimes is it also made of blood.'

Something she never does indoors, Paolina rolls two cigarettes, lights them, hands one to me, sits cross-legged by the hearth to wait the rising of her dough for the
dolce
. I sit beside her. We smoke in silence and without looking at one another. She rises then and I stay still. She walks toward the bedsheet curtain, pulls it aside and is about to pass behind it when I ask, ‘Will you?'

‘Accept him? I have always remembered, word for word, what he said to me on that long-ago day … He'd been right then. He's right still. With nothing of spite or spleen, nothing of gall, this morning I told him, “
Tesoro mio, ti voglio tanto bene ma io non mi sposarò mai. Mai
. My darling, I love you but I will never marry. Never.”

‘GILDA AIDA MIMI-VIOLETTA ONOFRIO.' GILDA SAYS THE
name slowly, lingering on each vowel, rolling the r's theatrically. She laughs, looks at me, repeats it. ‘I was fortunate that my mother didn't deem to put
ciocio-san
in there somewhere.'

‘Madame Butterfly?'

‘The same. Mamma was a soprano. Promising, from what I understand. Understood.'

Gilda Aida Mimi-Violetta Onofrio. I try out the sound in my mind. For years she's been simply Gilda. Not even a last name. I look at her now as she sits at the rustico work table in front of a four-kilo hill of fresh borlotti beans, her tiny white fingers flying over the pods, slitting them open with a thumbnail, turning out the red marbled beans into a large pot. Two of the dishes for tonight's supper are being prepared by others, leaving little but the antipasto to Gilda and I. We'll stew the beans with a faggot of rosemary and sage and a whole
guanciale
– dried pig cheek – cut into the finest dice and then smeared against the wooden table so it forms a rough paste. Once the beans are cooked we'll pound the mass in a mortar with a pestle, adding drops of olive oil as we go. There are so many beans that we'll each work on half the amount: Gilda with a wooden mortar and a marble pestle, I with a marble mortar and a wooden pestle. It's the contrast between wood and stone that works best to smooth and crush. Some sea salt, a little more oil. The lush stuff is to be spread on potato focaccia, the dough for which I'll mix now while Gilda finishes podding the beans. Cornmeal, rye and unbleached flours, mashed potato, white wine, a natural yeast made from grape and potato skins, which I'd left to ferment for a week or so. Sea salt and white wine. No water. My hands deep in the glutinous mass, I say Gilda's name out loud now, repeat it in several tones and American accents. She likes it best when I say it with a Georgia twang. She tries saying it that way, too, but the sound she makes is more Smolensk than Atlanta.

‘Tell me about your mother,' I say, without having decided I would.

Immediately I regret my request, innocent as it was and inspired by her own reference to her mother. By blood and temperament, Umbrians are often reticent. Umbrage, shade, shadow, darkness, ghost. An uninvited guest. A man –
hombre
. All these words and images are derived from the Latin,
umbraticum
. A half-nod, a quiet
buongiorno, buona sera
, the occasional,
come va?
It's these that suffice as social repertoire. In Umbria, it's hard to find a rhapsodist whereas, for instance, in Naples, it's hard to fine one who is not. As I've learned, the Thursday women can be exceptions; garrulous, rambling if it suits them, each one deciding for herself what she'll declare, what she'll withhold, to whom, when and if. Perhaps I'd risked invasion because, since the evening of the faulty gasoline gauge and the black velvet hat a year ago, Gilda and I have spent time together other than on Thursdays. We've taken to meeting at the markets, gone afterward to drink
aperitivi
and often she's come to supper at our apartment with Miranda. I express my regret by recasting the question.

‘I mean, if it would please you … to tell me about her.'

Gilda looks up from the beans, her lips arranged in a smile, her eyes far away. She shakes her shoulders. Feigns nonchalance. After a while, she says, ‘I think it would please me. To tell you about Magdalena.'