The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (25 page)

‘Magdalena?'

‘That's her name. Was. Still is, I guess. My mother is Magdalena.'

‘Okay. Good, I mean,
good
as long as the telling is what you want to do.'

‘It is.'

We both stay quiet then, each at our work and I think she might have meant that she'd like to tell me about her mother but not necessarily now. The only sounds in the old rustico are Gilda's stripped beans hitting the cooking pot and my one-handed slapping of the dough against the bowl. I look at her looking down. A narrow, well-made, pale-skinned woman, the bones of her face strangely strong among all that delicateness.

‘As far as I know, that is. I can tell you only as far as that …' she says by way of preamble, of apology I think. As though she might fear what she knows is not enough. ‘My mother was born in Orvieto, late in the life of her parents, adoring parents. Their own sun and moon, Magdalena was the darling of the Via del Duomo. Yes, in the street where you live, my mother was born.'

Gilda smiles, a borlotto pod still in her hand, she flicks her hair away from the whisky eyes.

‘Not in your palazzo, though, but further up near the piazza.'

‘Still …' I say, shaking my head, about to say something banal about how tiny is the world but stay quiet instead.

‘Yes,
still
,' she agrees. ‘So, Magdalena. Even at seven and eight, her voice was eerily potent. Sometimes people still talk about my mother's voice. About her. The neighbours would wait for her to sing, plan their tasks and outings around her practice times and, when she was, I think, eleven, some of them took turns walking her to Petrangeli palazzo in Via Malabranca. Up the eighty-six marble steps to the studio of a local maestro who wore a beret and smoked gold-papered cigarettes. Whenever she or my grandmother would tell the story they would always say
that
part – about the gold-papered cigarettes – in a whisper.

‘Camili was his name. And when Magdalena was fourteen – precisely fourteen – this Camili paid a call to my grandparents' apartment, a beaver coat over his shoulders. He'd come to announce that he could do no more for their child. It was at Santa Cecilia in Rome where Magdalena must be trained. He'd already spoken with the director, already ‘arranged' for her tuition to study at the famous academy. Only Neapolitans are better at ‘arranging' things than Umbrians, but I suspect you've learned that by now. Who knows with whose soul Camili bartered for Magdalena's scholarship, surely not his own. And so, at fourteen, Magdalena was packed off to live with her mother's sister, also a woman of age, long a widow, childless. I, too, would one day live with that aunt, by then a perilously doddering old thing but … I'm not there yet, am I?

‘I know little of Magdalena's story from that point. Safe to say, I think, her shift from cosseted princess of the Via del Duomo to struggling artist must have been violent, suddenly plunged as she was into a sea of talents formidable as her own. As the story went, Magdalena turned petulant. I suppose any princess would. And knowing the old
zia
as I eventually did, I can say that she would have been an unlikely pacifier, benumbed by life as she must have already been even then. She was of that ilk of Italian woman who abhorred the palest form of resistance to her will. Meeting it, she preferred to light another cigarette, unwrap another chocolate, say, to no one in particular, “
Che cosa devo fa?
What can I do?” Thus my mother kept her own counsel.

‘Proof – at seventeen Magdalena quit Santa Cecilia and announced her betrothal to a barista in Sant Eustachio. Gastone Pepucci he was called. When I was … after my mother passed away … after she was gone, I mean, you know, when I was old enough to understand, the aunt told me that there'd never been a wedding but I didn't believe her. I still don't. I found a dress in Magdalena's trunk, it could only have been a wedding dress. There was nothing of photos but to what does that testify? Oversight, I'd say. In any case, I was born soon after … after the wedding or the elopement or … I was born soon after. And soon after
that
it was when Gastone Pepucci left Magdalena to seek better work in Milano or Switzerland. I've heard both versions. “Ostensibly to seek work” was a phrase still being bandied about by the aunt when I was old enough to wonder what it meant. I remember asking my mother, “Is Ostensibly a city in Switzerland?” She told me it was. I'm getting ahead again, I'm sorry.

‘I must have been only a few months old when Magdalena left the apartment she'd shared with Gastone Pepucci to return to the old aunt, baby and baggage in hand. I think Magdalena withheld both my presence and the absence of Gastone Pepucci from my grandparents in Orvieto, the old aunt having convinced my mother that would be best. Consequently, I never knew my grandparents. All the while that Magdalena and I lived together with the aunt, grandparents were never mentioned. Only years afterward did I even begin to wonder about them. Who were they, where were they, why weren't we part of their lives, when did they die, what were their names? How can such estrangement happen in a family?

‘What with the princess subdued in the still-adolescent Magdalena, the aunt, I can imagine the aunt, aloof, bovine, handing down embargoes and decrees upon my bewildered mother. That must have been the time when Magdalena began to sing almost incessantly, her voice haunting the small, fusty rooms of the aunt's apartment. Puccini being the perfect accompaniment to despair, Magdalena sang him. I remember trying to echo her, forming my mouth the way she did hers, hunching my shoulders, closing my eyes. Magdalena would laugh, place a finger over my lips. “Your little pipes make the sound of a piccolo played in a tempest,” she would say.

‘Years passed with no word from Gastone Pepucci and, slowly, Magdalena withered, dying of some ethereal complaint, which might have been suicide. I was eight.

‘I remember her. Of course I do, if more as a drawing or a painting than flesh and bones. She was always there, but never there. Not all of her. Try as I would to make a conquest of her, to distract her from whatever or whomever it was that kept her away from me, to make her
see
me, to let me
be enough
, I never could. I can hear her singing, though. She left me that. That was real. My mother's voice was real.'

•

Though Gilda and I never break stride in task after task while she speaks and I listen, the pace of her story is reluctant, dreamy. She grows silent now and then, taking time to search her thoughts, to weed, I think, until she's ready to resume it, sustaining it with a kind of nimbleness if only for a while before she goes quiet again.

When all our work is finished, the fire laid, bread set to rising in the cheese hut, the stove lit, table set, we go to walk in the meadow, smoke the short, thin, clove-perfumed cigars I've taken to of late. We speak of who knows how many things, always high-stepping the edges of her story, both of us regretting her candour, Gilda for her revelation, I for its weight. We light two more cigars and I am about to launch yet one more inane attempt at distraction when she says, ‘So, I was eight when Magdalena died. Or ran away. And to the old aunt's wintering life, I was a burden. She had no taste for the vigil it would want to keep me from echoing the disgraces of my mother. The disgraces of Magdalena. It was to the orphanage of Sant' Eufemia where I would go, the aunt decided. The nuns would shape me. They would protect me.'

Gilda giggles then, a girlish laugh rare to her and an overture, I think, to a pleasant turn in the story. We wander back toward the rustico, stop to sit on the stones of the sheepfold wall and Gilda takes my hand, turns it palm up as though to read its lines but rather she presses her own against it. To the millimetre, our hands are the same size. ‘You're the first full-grown woman I've known with hands small as mine.' From Miranda, I think Gilda already knows something of my own shaping by the nuns.

‘I would learn much later that half the aunt's pension opened the doors if not the hearts of the Sisters of Mercy to me. And – not to be outdone – the priests who came to say mass each morning in the convent opened the black bone buttons of their serge trousers to me as well.
I punizioni
. Punishments. As standard on the curriculum as vespers, the punishments were the inviolate and holy fathers' historical if not just desserts, sacred spoils of their office. Though the ordeals were meted out upon only the youngest and prettiest of the little girls, all of the boys of Sant' Eufemia were subject to the holy fathers' summons. The boys were fewer in number and so were punished with a gruesome constancy. But there were so many of us girls under ten – ten seeming to be the maximum age of the girls who piqued the priests' lust – that our turns in the sacristy before or after mass came about rarely enough.

‘But the punishments were only one of the ways to suffer at Sant' Eufemia: the everyday hunger and weariness, being cold, being hot, being alone … There were worse torments than being made to stand and watch while one priest or another set about his feats by himself or with the aid of one of the boys. They rarely touched us, we girls. I would look where I was commanded to look but I developed a sort of open-eyed blindness. I could look without seeing. I still do that.'

‘You do. You still do that. It's true.'

Gilda laughs. ‘You've noticed … I don't mean to, you know. It's only …'

‘I understand. Now I understand.'

She smiles, shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. ‘A small relic of the punishments, I suppose … the faraway gaze,' she says, looking straight into my eyes. She proceeds: ‘Abuse comes in many colours. Certain of its tints are all the rage now, aren't they? Popular polemics. A week in the hot light of the press and then the tortured are left to the business of their broken lives and the torturers are enfolded into some far-off flock, sent away if not to the stake or the gallows or down to the river with stones sewn to the hems of their trousers as they sometimes were in earlier epochs. Yes, now they are simply hidden. And wherever they are hidden, a fresh batch of babies is likely nearby. Civilisation. Ours. I've often wondered what the old aunt would have thought about the nuns'
protection
of me had she known of the punishments.'

‘Did you ever try to tell her?'

‘Of course. Not in distinct words. Eight-year-olds don't normally have the
distinct words
. I might have had them but even if I did, there was, even then, the suffocating sense that I wouldn't be believed. That my aunt wouldn't believe me. And not being believed was more frightening to me than were the punishments themselves. Telling and not being championed, not being rescued, that's what terrified me. Not being believed was akin to not being loved. They were the same thing to me: being believed and being loved. I think they still are. Anyway, back then I thought:
Better not to test it
.'

Gilda looks at me then, her gaze enraged. ‘But I did try to tell the old aunt. Every time I saw her. But not in
distinct words
. Miranda was the first person I told. And not so long ago. It's easier to tell you now that she knows. That someone else knows. But I think the nuns knew. I'm certain they did. Perhaps they, too, were punished. More likely they were too deep in their own salaciousness to care. They did their duty, kept us from being not too filthy and not too hungry. They taught us our lessons, some of our lessons. The rest we learned by ourselves.'

•

We sit a while longer on the stones in the twilight, basking in a kind of complicity, shared if mostly unspoken. Her auto lights spent, it's Ninuccia who swerves onto the gravel.

‘Why isn't the fire lit?' This her only greeting.

Gilda begins to assure her but I walk over to the auto, say, ‘Ciao, Ninuccia.' I try to hug her but she is already bending into the back seat to fetch pots and sacks, some of which she hands to me before she leans in to offer her cheek to kiss.

Within the hour, the rustico is full to its sagging rafters on this November evening in 2007. Miranda, Ninuccia, Paolina, Gilda, Iacovo, Fernando, Filiberto, Pierangelo, Niccolò and I had just sat down at table when Miranda's most beloved trucker knocked at the door, told her he was
just passing by
to say hello. ‘
Non voglio disturbatvi
,
scusatami
. I didn't want to disturb you, pardon me,' he says, eyeing the room and the table and us. Miranda sends him to the kitchen to wash while Niccolò finds him a bench and the evening begins with the passing of and the tearing at the potato flatbreads, the slathering of the pieces with the borlotti, which Gilda and I had pounded down to silk. It's potential richness having been the object of a somewhat harsh discussion between Ninuccia and I when we all planned tonight's menu, it's she who is first to finish her piece of focaccia, reach to tear off another and spoon more of the mousse onto her plate. Signifying ‘delicious', she swivels her index finger into her cheek, nods her compliments to me and I wonder,
How long it will want before she begins to trust me?

Tonight the tribe is deep in the annual strife over olives. Did the rain come too late, was the summer hot enough, the hail that fell three days ago, how cruel was its damage? Niccolò's groves are ancient, terraced on hillsides, and so receive sun and water obliquely, with more mercy than Pierangelo's and Iacovo's groves, which sit on flat land and so are more ruthlessly prey to the caprice of water and sun. It was Filiberto who planted Miranda's hundred-tree
oliveto
near the rustico eight or nine years ago and its most bountiful yield barely suffices for her sister's extended family and Thursday Nights. It is now less than a week before the November full moon and the beginning of this year's harvest and I, typically entranced by the subject, hear only a word now and then of their talk of quantity, quality, acid per cent, intensity of flavour and colour, the most current of the scandals over farmers who blend inferior Pugliese oil with the local and pass it off to exporters as pure Umbrian. It's Ninuccia who distracts me:
How long will it want before she begins to trust me?